The State of Victoria has some truly wonderful regional galleries. I hadn’t been to Castlemaine Art Gallery and Historical Museum for a few years and I had forgotten what an absolutely stunning gallery it is. Stylish art deco building, diffused natural light filling the expansive spaces of the wood floored galleries, displaying interesting art works from their collection. I particularly liked the Edward J Shearsby, Ethel Carrick, John Perceval and, my favourite, a most glorious Sydney Long Pastoral scene (1909, below).
To top off an inspirational visit, there was the most beautiful exhibition of small oil on canvas and oil on cedar panel paintings by the artist David Moore: Glimpses of Chewton. These works had me entranced. Comprised of three years work, these paintings are an exploration of the region by the artist who bought a house in the area with his partner. Moore set out to discover Chewton through driving the local roads and by doing small paintings of the views… not the big vista but the small glimpse. As I said to Moore in a recent telephone conversation, small vibrations of energy.
You can really feel that the artist has captured the frequency – and by that I mean the song line – and spiritual energy of the landscape. These are strong paintings with sensuous brush work yet they are quiet and still in their presence before you – sensitive and beautiful. I love the size of them, like small jewels, and they draw you in and hold you. The gridded hang is especially effective. For an artist to feel these vibrations of energy is one thing, for it then to be transferred into the art is an entirely, and difficult, other. The correspondence between Moore’s work and the Sydney Long Pastoral scene is quite delicious to contemplate. Apparently, these were supposed to be preparatory sketches for larger studio based work, which will eventuate over time, but once Moore had started on these “glimpses” he kept going, creating this body of work. I am so thankful that he did, and I am grateful that I visited the gallery to see them. They made my day.
Do yourself a favour, take a day trip to Castlemaine. It’s well worth the visit.
An exhibition of works painted in and around the town of Chewton, in North Central Victoria. Local artist David Moore is one of Australia’s foremost painters and was a recipient of the A.M.E Bale Residental Scholarship and the Norman Kaye award. He teaches painting in Melbourne, and is represented by Chrysalis Galleries in Melbourne.
About the Castlemaine Art Gallery and Historical Museum
Founded in 1913, the Castlemaine Art Gallery and Historical Museum has a unique collection of Australian art and fascinating historical artefacts reflecting the early history of the district. The beautiful art deco building, dating from 1931 with several extensions since then, is a work of art itself, with purpose-built galleries, lit largely by natural lighting.
The Gallery and Museum is fully accredited by Museums Australia. It is governed by private trustees and managed by a committee elected by subscribers. State and local government support is provided, and the Gallery has a strong tradition of support from benefactors, local families, artists and patrons.
Sydney Long (Australian, 1871-1955) Pastoral scene (installation view) 1909 Oil on cardboard Gift of Lady Mary Spencer 1949 Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Formerly known as Narrabeen landscape, this painting has been retitled due to uncertainty in its depiction of Narrabeen.
With paintings such as this, Long sought to produce works of the most imaginative kind from his surroundings. A panoramic vista, the artist focused on the patterns of light and shade over the landscape to create a sense of depth, leading the viewer’s eye to the blue hills in the background.
Sydney Long (Australian, 1871-1955) Pastoral scene (installation view detail) 1909 Oil on cardboard Gift of Lady Mary Spencer 1949 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Edward J Shearsby (active c. 1900-1930 Melbourne) An Impression of Collins Street (installation view) c. 1910 Oil on board Estate of Barbara H Gordon 1999 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
The high viewpoint and bustling street are similar to Pissarro’s Boulevard Montmartre, morning, cloudy weather 1897 in the National Gallery of Victoria. Impressionism had an enormous influence on Australian artists from the late 19th century, mostly in the form of reproductions brought back by expatriate artists.
Edward J Shearsby (active c. 1900-1930 Melbourne) An Impression of Collins Street (installation view detail) c. 1910 Oil on board Estate of Barbara H Gordon 1999 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Frederick McCubbin (Australian, 1855-1917) Golden sunlight (installation view) 1914 Oil on canvas Gift of Dame Nellie Melba 1923 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Frederick McCubbin (Australian, 1855-1917) Golden sunlight (installation view detail) 1914 Oil on canvas Gift of Dame Nellie Melba 1923 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
The setting is below the artist’s family home on the Yarra River, South Yarra. Instead of the sight of the industrial stone crusher on the opposite bank, McCubbin has created an Arcadian fantasy of colour and light. Dame Nellie Melba possibly bought the work when she visited the McCubbin’s during an Australian tour. Melba’s father, David Mitchell, had an interest in a local Newstead mine and she visited the Gallery collection prior to donating.
The artist has used a ‘scumble’ technique: building up many layers of thinly applied paint giving a transparent effect. The composition was fist sketched in white and sienna, followed by pigment mixed on the palette and applied with a knife and brush handle to keep the colours pure. Later the work was rubbed with a pumice stone to give a smooth surface. Colours from different layers were allowed to show through. Highlights were applied over the top with paint straight from the tube.
E Phillips Fox (Australian, 1865-1915) On the Mediterranean Coast (installation view) c. 1911 Oil on canvas Presented 1935 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Ethel Carrick (Australian, 1872-1952) Untitled (Royal Avenue, Versailles) (installation view) c. 1909 Oil on panel Gift of Major B R F MacNay 1978 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Ethel Carrick (Australian, 1872-1952) Untitled (Royal Avenue, Versailles) (installation view detail) c. 1909 Oil on panel Gift of Major B R F MacNay 1978 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Lina Bryans (Australian, 1909-2000) Plum Tree (installation view) 1947 Oil on composition board Purchased with funds from the Felix Cappy Bequest in his memory, 2014 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Probably painted at Stanhope House, Eltham by the font gate near the cedar tree overlooking the old orchard on the property.
Lina Bryans (Australian, 1909-2000) Plum Tree (installation view detail) 1947 Oil on composition board Purchased with funds from the Felix Cappy Bequest in his memory, 2014 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Lina Bryans (Australian, 1909-2000)
A modernist, Bryans was associated with Frater’s circle which included Ada May Plante and Isabel Hunter Tweddle. Her first works were painted early in 1937 and Basil Burdett selected her Backyards, South Yarra in 1938 for the Herald Exhibition of Outstanding Pictures of 1937. Her work was included in Burdett’s article in Studio (1938) and in the exhibition, Art of Australia 1788-1941, shown at MoMA (New York) in 1941. Bryans went to live in Darebin Bridge House, a converted coach-house at Darebin, in the late 1930s, joining Ada May Plante. Bryans subsequently purchased it using her inheritance, painted and decorated it distinctively and named it “The Pink Hotel”. It became an artists’ colony for Bryans, Plante, Frater, Ambrose Hallen and Ian Fairweather and other artists. It was a centre for a group of writers associated with the journal Meanjin, from whom Lina’s son Edward developed his interest in journalism.
In 1948 Bryans had her first solo exhibition. It included Nude (1945, NGV) and Portrait of Nina Christesen (1947), both painted at Darebin, which she sold later that year and moved to Harkaway, near Berwick. She took a few lessons from George Bell in 1948 and from Mary Cockburn Mercer in 1951. In 1953 she went to America, then to France where she studied for a few months at La Grande Chaumière and visited Mercer in the south of France. Back at Melbourne, she once more became prominent in the city’s artistic and cultural milieu.
Landscape painting was always important to Bryans and throughout the 1960s and 1970s, it became more dramatic and abstract. In 1965 she visited Central Australia and painted extremely colourful modernist paintings of the Australian bush. She was awarded the 1966 Crouch Prize for Embedded Rock (1964, BFAG). Her major work Landscape Quartet from her second solo exhibition, held at Georges Gallery in 1966, was purchased by the National Gallery of Victoria, which awarded her a retrospective in 1982, held at Banyule Gallery in 1982, which subsequently toured regional galleries in Victoria.
Nevertheless, as Forwood notes (2001), her portraits ‘best reveal her contribution to Australian art’, moreover, ‘her seventy-three portraits of friends engaged in the world of art and letters form a pictorial biography of Bryans herself’. Her well-known portrait of Australian writer Jean May Campbell, The Babe is Wise, (named after Campbell’s novel of the year before) was painted in 1940. It is held in the National Gallery of Victoria collection.
John Perceval (Australian, 1923-2000) Double Sunset (installation view) 1961 Oil on composition board Purchased 1962 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
John Perceval (Australian, 1923-2000) Double Sunset (installation view detail) 1961 Oil on composition board Purchased 1962 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Charles Blackman (Australian, 1928-2018) Dream Image (installation view) 1963 Oil on canvas on composition board Purchased 1964 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Charles Blackman (Australian, 1928-2018) Dream Image (installation view detail) 1963 Oil on canvas on composition board Purchased 1964 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Two views of Castlemaine Art Gallery and Historical Museum with works in situ Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Clifton Pugh (Australian, 1924-1990) The Crab Catcher (installation view) 1958 Oil on composition board Purchased 1958 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Jacks (Australian, 1943-2014) Goddess (installation view) 1959-1960 Bronze Gift of the artist 2001 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Clifford Last (Australian, 1918-1993) Family Group 1958 Limed Pine Gift of the Subscribers 1958 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Castlemaine Art Gallery and Historical Museum 14 Lyttleton Street (PO Box 248) Castlemaine, Vic 3450 Australia Phone: (03) 5472 2292 Email:info@castlemainegallery.com
Curators: Malcolm Rogers, Director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston working with curatorial research associate James Leighton, and other curators including Karen Haas, Anne E. Havinga, and Kristen Gresh
Another artist lost too soon to HIV/AIDS. At least we have these fine classics to remember him by. The portrait of Nelson Mandela is especially powerful – tightly cropped, the photographer portrays a man of immense strength and intensity through the hand and the finger, but above all the single eye which contains ageless wisdom.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Museum of Fine Arts Boston for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), flashes back to the ’90s this spring with an evocative exhibition dedicated to the photography of Herb Ritts (1952-2002). Known for his beautifully printed, formally bold and sensual black-and-white images of celebrities and supermodels such as Cindy Crawford and Naomi Campbell, his works often blurred the line between art and commerce. Throughout the ’90s, his photography was inescapable in popular culture – appearing everywhere from magazine covers to music videos and commercials. This exhibition revisits the artist, whose groundbreaking 1996 retrospective at the MFA, Herb Ritts: WORK, remains one of the most highly attended exhibitions in Museum history. Nearly 20 years later, the MFA is taking a second look at his career, which was cut short in 2002 with his death from complications related to AIDS. Along with a selection of music videos and commercials, the exhibition features 52 black-and-white photographs that celebrate the sculpted body and the variable beauty of the human face. Ritts’ expert use of natural light results in dramatic images full of high-contrast lights and darks, as well as softer effects, such as light reflecting off water. Of the works on view, 15 are from a recent gift from the Herb Ritts Foundation – acquired by the MFA in December in honor of Malcolm Rogers, Ann and Graham Gund Director at the MFA. This, and previous gifts from Ritts and the Foundation dating back to 2000, allow the Museum to tell the full story of Ritts’ career, and comprise the largest museum holdings of Ritts photographs in the world (248 in total). The exhibition is on view in the MFA gallery named in honour of a gift from the Ritts Foundation – the Museum’s first dedicated solely to photography – and the adjacent Clementine Brown Gallery…
The exhibition explores every aspect of the photographer’s career, and is divided into two sections: one dedicated to the human body and one dedicated to his photographs of celebrity personalities. His approach to the nude pushed the confines of convention. Ritts captured not only beautiful bodies, but also the environment and elements surrounding his set: the Pacific Ocean, desert landscapes, and mountains. Whether photographing a Versace dress, a basketball star, or interpreting classical sculpture through dried, cracked clay on skin – as in Tony with Black Face, Profile, Los Angeles (1986) – Ritts and his photography embody the era. The predominant aesthetic in Ritts’s images is one of strong lines, bold contours and striking shadows. Today, his work appears in museum exhibitions around the globe.
Preferring to shoot during the golden hours of the day – when the sun is at a low angle – Ritts created works that demonstrate not only an expert use of natural light, but the ability to immortalise the subjects in front of his camera. In addition to photography, he also directed 13 music videos and more than 50 commercials throughout his career. Exploration of the human figure in its idealised form is a recurring theme in his video work, a selection of which is also included in the exhibition on three video screens. Lent by the Herb Ritts Foundation are videos of Madonna’s Cherish (1989), Chris Isaak’s Wicked Game (1991) and commercials dating from 1990-2002. A special MFA playlist on Spotify allows visitors to listen to music as they explore the gallery, and a case of archival materials includes a marked-up contact sheet and magazine spread that shed light on Ritts’ process.
During his career, Ritts forged strong connections with his subjects, many of whom became close friends. Throughout the exhibition visitors can find quotes from some of his sitters, including Cindy Crawford, who said of the artist: “There was something magical about when you stepped in front of his camera and what happened then. This give-and-take, and that’s what makes it fun. I’ve had the opportunity to work with Helmut Newton to Avedon to Penn but probably the images that are the most timeless of me, most of them, were shot by Herb and are some of my favourite images of myself.”
Crawford appears in one of Ritts’ most famous images, Stephanie, Cindy, Christy, Tatjana, Naomi, Hollywood (1989). Taken at the end of a long day photographing a fashion editorial assignment for Rolling Stone, the image also includes Stephanie Seymour, Tatjana Patitz, Naomi Campbell and Christy Turlington. Ritts also worked with Turlington on a Gianni Versace advertising campaign, which took them to the dry Mojave Desert lakebed known as El Mirage, where the vast open space gave him a sense of creative freedom. He used the gusts of a rising storm to coax a swath of fabric into an arch over the model’s head in Versace Dress, Back View, El Mirage (1990). Ritts’ photographs of celebrities and models appeared on magazine covers including Vanity Fair, Vogue, Interview, Playboy, TIME, Rolling Stone, and Allure.
Ritts had a particular affinity for photographing actors, musicians and cultural icons. The artist that he collaborated with most frequently was Madonna, whose whimsical Madonna, Tokyo (1987) was taken in her hotel when the Who’s That Girl World Tour opened in Japan. Generally, Ritts preferred to capture his subjects in spontaneous, playful moments such as these. “I think that with her, and with other people as well, the big word is trust,” Ritts said. “A person feels they can trust you because they know your reputation and what you’re about. Or they can feel it because over the years a tight relationship develops, as it did with Madonna. You work together and it clicks; you evolve.
Press release from the Museum of Fine Arts Boston website
The fascination continues. All these centuries later.
Marcus
Many thankx to the J. Paul Getty Museum for allowing me to publish the art work in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“Beauty is the only thing that time cannot harm. Philosophies fall away like sand, creeds follow one another, but what is beautiful is a joy for all seasons, a possession for all eternity.”
Oscar Wilde
“Our ambition should be to rule ourselves, the true kingdom for each one of us; and true progress is to know more, and be more, and to do more.”
Oscar Wilde
During the Hellenistic period – from the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C. until the establishment of the Roman Empire in 31 B.C. – the medium of bronze drove artistic innovation in Greece and elsewhere across the Mediterranean. Sculptors moved beyond Classical norms, supplementing traditional subjects and idealised forms with realistic renderings of physical and emotional states. Bronze – surpassing marble with its tensile strength, reflective effects, and ability to hold the finest detail – was employed for dynamic compositions, dazzling displays of the nude body, and graphic expressions of age and character.
Cast from alloys of copper, tin, lead, and other elements, bronze statues were produced in the thousands throughout the Hellenistic world. They were concentrated in public spaces and outdoor settings: honorific portraits of rulers and citizens populated city squares, and images of gods, heroes, and mortals crowded sanctuaries. Few, however, survive, and those that do are dispersed worldwide and customarily displayed as isolated masterpieces. This exhibition unites a significant number of the large-scale bronzes preserved today so that they can be seen in context. New discoveries are presented together with works known for centuries, and several closely related statues are shown side by side for the first time.
Text from the J. Paul Getty Museum website
Pathos
Pathos is one of the three modes of persuasion in rhetoric (along with ethos and logos). Pathos appeals to the audience’s emotions. It is a part of Aristotle’s philosophies in rhetoric.
It is not to be confused with ‘bathos’, which is an attempt to perform in a serious, dramatic fashion that fails and ends up becoming comedy.
Pathetic events in a plot are also not to be confused with tragic events. In a tragedy, the character brings about his or her own demise, whereas those invoking pathos often occur to innocent characters, invoking unmerited grief.
Emotional appeal can be accomplished in a multitude of ways: by a metaphor or story telling, common as a hook, by a general passion in the delivery and an overall number of emotional items in the text of the speech, or in writing.
Pathos is an appeal to the audience’s ethical judgment. It can be in the form of metaphor, simile, a passionate delivery, or even a simple claim that a matter is unjust. Pathos can be particularly powerful if used well, but most speeches do not solely rely on pathos. Pathos is most effective when the author connects with an underlying value of the reader.
Aristotle’s Three Modes of Persuasion in Rhetoric
Installation views of the exhibition Power and Pathos at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
During the Hellenistic era artists around the Mediterranean created innovative, realistic sculptures of physical power and emotional intensity. Bronze – with its reflective surface, tensile strength, and ability to hold the finest details – was employed for dynamic compositions, graphic expressions of age and character, and dazzling displays of the human form. On view at the J. Paul Getty Museum from July 28 through November 1, 2015, Power and Pathos: Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World is the first major international exhibition to bring together more than 50 ancient bronzes from the Mediterranean region and beyond ranging from the 4th century B.C. to the 1st century A.D.
“The representation of the human figure is central to the art of almost all ancient cultures, but nowhere did it have greater importance, or more influence on later art history, than in Greece,” said Timothy Potts, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “It was in the Hellenistic period that sculptors pushed to the limit the dramatic effects of billowing drapery, tousled hair, and the astonishingly detailed renderings of veins, wrinkles, tendons, and musculature, making the sculpture of their time the most life-like and emotionally charged ever made, and still one of the high points of European art history. At its best, Hellenistic sculpture leaves nothing to be desired or improved upon. The more than 50 works in the exhibition represent the finest of these spectacular and extremely rare works that survive, and makes this one of the most important exhibitions of ancient classical sculpture ever mounted. This is a must-see event for anyone with an interest in classical art or sculpture.”
Large-scale bronze sculptures are among the rarest survivors of antiquity; their valuable metal was typically melted and reused. Rows of empty pedestals still seen at many ancient sites are a stark testimony to the bygone ubiquity of bronze statuary in the Hellenistic era. Ironically, many bronzes known today still exist because they were once lost at sea, only to be recovered centuries later. Power and Pathos: Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World is especially remarkable for bringing together rare works of art that are usually exhibited in isolation. When viewed in proximity to one another, the variety of styles and techniques employed by ancient sculptors is emphasised to greater effect, as are the varying functions and histories of the bronze sculptures. Bronze, cast in moulds, was a material well-suited to reproduction, and the exhibition provides an unprecedented opportunity to see objects of the same type, and even from the same workshop together for the first time. For example, two herms of Dionysos – the Mahdia Herm from the Bardo National Museum, Tunisia and the Getty Herm were made in the same workshop and have not been shown together since antiquity.
“The Mahdia Herm was found off the Tunisian coast in 1907 together with the cargo of an ancient ship carrying many artworks from Greece,” said Jens Daehner, one of the curators of the exhibition. “It is the only surviving case of an ancient bronze signed by an artist (Boëthos of Kalchedon). The idea that the Getty Herm comes from the same workshop is based on the close match of the bronze – an alloy of copper, tin, lead, and other trace elements that’s like the DNA of bronze sculptures. The information that these two works yield when studied together is extraordinary. It is a perfect example of how revealing and instructive it is to contemplate Hellenistic bronzes in concert with one another.”
The exhibition is organised into six sections: Images of Rulers, Bodies Ideal and Extreme, Images of the Gods, The Art of Replication, Likeness and Expression, and Retrospective Styles.
“Our aim in bringing together this extraordinary group of the most significant ancient bronzes that have survived is to present these works, normally viewed as isolated masterpieces, in their larger contexts,” said Kenneth Lapatin, the show’s co-curator. “These stunning sculptures come together to tell a rich story, not only of artistic accomplishment, but also of the political and cultural concerns of the people who commissioned, created, and viewed them more than two thousand years ago.”
Among the many famous works is the so-called Head of a Man from Delos from the National Museum of Athens, a compellingly expressive portrait with well-preserved inlaid eyes. The dramatic image of an unknown sitter is believed to date from the end of the second or beginning of the first century BC. The iconic Terme Boxer on loan from the National Roman Museum, with its realistic scars and bruises, stands out as the epitome of the modern understanding of Hellenistic art, employing minute detail and an emphatic, arresting subject. The weary fighter, slumped and exhausted after his brutal competition, combines the power and pathos that is unique to Hellenistic sculpture.
Although rarely surviving today, multiple versions of the same work were the norm in antiquity. A good example is the figure of an athlete shown holding a strigil, a curved blade used to scrape oil and dirt off the skin, known in Greek as the apoxyomenos or “scraper”. This exhibition brings together three bronze casts – two full statues and a head – that are late Hellenistic or early Roman Imperial versions of a statue created in the 300s BC by a leading sculptor of the time. This was evidently one of the most famous works of its time and copies were made well into the Roman Imperial period.
Press release from the J. Paul Getty Museum website
Encountering Ancient Bronzes
Portrait of Aule Meteli “The Arringatore” 125-100 B.C. Greek Bronze and copper H: 170 x W: 68.6 x D: 101.6cm (5 ft 6 15/16 x 27 x 40 in.) Image courtesy of the Soprintendenza per i Beni Archeologici della Toscana – Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Firenze Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Firenze (Soprintendenza per i Beni Archeologici della Toscana)
Discovered in the mid-1500s at Sanguineto, in the Etruscan heartland that is now the border between Tuscany and Umbria, this statue entered the Medici collection in Florence shortly thereafter. Identified as Aule Meteli in an Etruscan inscription on the lower edge of the garment, the figure raises one hand in a gesture that appears to request silence at the start of a speech – hence the modern Italian name Arringatore (Orator). He wears a striped tunic under a toga, laced sandals, and a ring on his left hand. The realism of his facial features is a Hellenistic Greek hallmark that is also seen in contemporary Italic and Roman Republican portraits. The statue was assembled from nine separately cast parts. The extended right arm demonstrates the ability of bronze – stronger and lighter than marble – to render dynamic poses without support.
The retrograde inscription is in the Etruscan alphabet reads: “auleśi meteliś ve[luś] vesial clenśi / cen flereś tece sanśl tenine / tu θineś χisvlicś” (“To (or from) Auli Meteli, the son of Vel and Vesi, Tenine (?) set up this statue as a votive offering to Sans, by deliberation of the people”)
Herm of Dionysos 200-100 B.C. Bronze, copper, and stone H 103.5cm; W 23.5cm; D 19.5cm Attributed to the Workshop of Boëthos of Kalchedon (Greek, active about 200-100 B.C.) The J. Paul Getty Museum
This herm is nearly identical in type and size to its “twin” from Mahdia, which is signed by the artist Boëthos of Kalchedon. Both were manufactured using the same method: hollow casting by the lost-wax process. Somewhat better preserved, this example retains one of its original stone eyes, encased in copper lashes. Its wax model, however, was less artfully prepared than that of the signed version. There are shortcuts in the looping of the ribbons, and the absence of grape leaves on the headdress is particularly noticeable. Metal analysis has established that both works were cast with a remarkably similar alloy that distinguishes them from other bronze sculptures. Thus despite differences in detail and execution, they were likely produced at the same time, in the same workshop, and using the same batch of metal.
Survival
Large-scale bronze statues have rarely survived from antiquity, as most were melted down so that their valuable metal could be reused. Rows of empty stone pedestals can still be seen at ancient sites, leaving just an impression of the ubiquity of bronze sculpture in the Hellenistic world. Ironically, many bronzes known today have been preserved because they were buried or lost at sea, only to be recovered centuries later by archaeologists, divers, and fishermen.
Cultural Geography
Hellenistic art was a widespread phenomenon, propelled by the vast expansion of the Greek world under Alexander the Great in the late fourth century B.C. The impact of Greek culture can be traced not only throughout the Mediterranean from Italy to Egypt, but also in regions beyond such as Thrace in the Balkans, Colchis (in the present-day Republic of Georgia), and the southern Arabian Peninsula. Itinerant Greek bronze workers satisfied commissions far from their homeland, while local craftsmen employed indigenous techniques to create statues in fashionable Greek styles. Through trade, migration, plunder, and emulation, bronze sculpture served as a vehicle for the transfer of culture and technology.
Reproduction
Unique as most ancient bronzes appear today, many were never intended as “originals” in the modern sense of the word. The process of casting statues in moulds not only facilitated the production of multiples but also allowed for the faithful reproduction of older works from the Archaic and Classical periods of the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. Bronze copies as well as adaptations and recombinations in a variety of styles were made well into the Roman Imperial period.
Formulas of Power: Images of Rulers
The conquests of Alexander the Great (ruled 336-323 B.C.) transformed ancient politics and culture, creating new kingdoms and diminishing the autonomy of individual city-states. Alexander’s early death left his domain in the hands of his generals, the Diadochoi (Successors). They sought to emulate his charismatic style of leadership and adopted the visual models used to portray him as a dynamic, invincible young ruler. Many of these images were fashioned by Lysippos of Sikyon, Alexander’s favorite sculptor and the most celebrated artist of the time. Lysippos seems to have worked exclusively in bronze, adapting earlier Classical formulas for athletes, heroes, and gods and turning them into vigorous depictions of powerful kings.
Ruler portraiture emerged as a distinctive genre in the Hellenistic age, and bronze was its primary medium. The Diadochoi, like Alexander, were shown in various modes – nude, in armour, and on horseback. Although they typically commissioned their own portraits, statues of them were also erected as public honors by disempowered cities seeking or acknowledging favour. Today, the fragmentary condition of most of the surviving sculptures makes identification of the individuals difficult.
Alexander the Great on Horseback 100-1 B.C. Greek Bronze and silver H: 51 x W: 29 x D: 51cm (20 1/16 x 11 7/16 x 20 1/16 in.) Su concessione Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo – Soprintendenza per i Beni Archeologici di Napoli Photo: Giorgio Albano
Alexander the Great is recognisable by the royal diadem in his characteristic wavy hair. The Macedonian king wears a short chlamys (cloak), a cuirass, and laced military sandals. He once brandished a sword in his right hand, while his left hand grasped the reins of his rearing horse, presumably his favourite Boukephalos (Bull Head). Found in 1761 at Herculaneum in Italy, the statuette is thought to be a small-scale replica of the centrepiece of a monumental group by Lysippos. The now-lost original was set up in the Sanctuary of Zeus at Dion, in northern Greece, to commemorate Alexander’s victory over the Persians at the Granikos River in 334 B.C.; it was transferred to Rome in 146 B.C.
Horse Head “The Medici Riccardi Horse” About 350 B.C. Italian Bronze and gold H: 81.3 x W: 97 x D: 35cm (32 x 38 3/16 x 13 3/4 in.) National Archaeological Museum of Florence (Superintendency for the Archaeological Heritage of Tuscany) Image courtesy of the Soprintendenza per i Beni Archeologici della Toscana – Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Firenze
Once part of an equestrian statue, this well preserved horse head displays highly realistic anatomical features. Although the inset eyes are missing, the flaring nostrils, the folds of the neck, and the open mouth stretched by a bit serve to emphasise the dynamic posture. Traces remain of the original gilding and the now-lost bridle. The medium of bronze allowed for the fine detail of the sculpture, whose vigorous muscularity and pulsing veins are among the expressive forms developed by Hellenistic artists.
Portrait of Seuthes III about 310-300 B.C. Greek Bronze, copper, calcite, alabaster, and glass Object: H: 32 x W: 28 x D: 27.9cm (12 5/8 x 11 x 11 in.) Image courtesy of National Institute of Archaeology with Museum, BAS Photo: Krasimir Georgiev
The power and intensity of this man’s gaze are enhanced by the use of several kinds of materials for his eyes. With long hair and full beard, the portrait is thought to depict Seuthes III, who ruled the Odrysian kingdom of Thrace (in present day Bulgaria) from about 331 B.C. to 300 B.C. Found in 2004 at the monumental tomb of Seuthes at Šipka, the head may have been part of a full-length statue that originally stood in Seuthopolis, a city he founded in the vicinity.
Portrait of a Man 100-1 B.C. Bronze H 29.5cm; W 21.5cm; D 21.5cm The J. Paul Getty Museum
Probably once part of a full-length statue, this head has roughly modelled hair that recalls portraits of Alexander the Great. The deep-set eyes were originally inlaid in another material, and the lips – with edges outlined in bronze – may have been plated with copper to achieve a more realistic polychromatic effect. Two short bronze rods inside the mouth could have been used to facilitate casting, or perhaps to attach teeth from the interior.
The kausia, a brimmed hat that originated in Macedonia (northern Greece), suggests that this figure is a Macedonian general or king. The band underneath his kausia may be a royal diadem. His preserved eyes are composed of different materials, including glass paste for the whites, a metal ring outlining each iris, and dark stone for the pupils. The head was found in 1997 in the Aegean Sea off the Greek island of Kalymnos. Components of bronze sculptures depicting cuirassed horsemen were recovered nearby.
The thick, curly hair of this youthful male recalls the style popularised by Alexander the Great, while the individualised features are reminiscent of portraits of his successors in the late fourth century B.C. The head originally belonged to a full-length figure that would have stood some 3.5 meters tall. Although lacking a diadem signifying royalty, the colossal portrait may represent the Macedonian ruler Demetrios Poliorketes, who was first proclaimed king at the age of thirty in 307 B.C., along with his father, Alexander’s general, Antigonos I Monophthalmos.
Ruler in the Guise of Hermes or Perseus 100 B.C. – A.D. 100 Bronze and copper H 71.2cm (76.5cm with base); W 30cm Soprintendenza per i Beni Archeologici di Napoli
The distinctive facial features suggest that this figure is a Hellenistic ruler, and the strap under his chin indicates that he originally wore a petasos, a wide-brimmed traveler’s hat. This cap as well as the wings attached to his ankles are attributes of both the god Hermes and the hero Perseus. Hellenistic kings were often shown in the guise of deities or mythological heroes, and scholars have proposed various identities for the individual depicted here. The statuette was discovered in 1901 in a house at Pompeii.
Flesh and Bronze: Bodies Ideal and Extreme
Hellenistic sculptors exploited Classical prototypes and continued to create idealised figures, but with a new interest in realistic detail and movement. Lysistratos, the brother of Lysippos, was credited with fashioning moulds directly from living bodies, and many Hellenistic bronzes exhibit considerable anatomical subtlety. Lifelike effects were achieved through the use of alloys and inlays to convey the contrasting colours of eyes, nipples, lips, teeth, bruises, and even blood.
Expanding the repertoire of images, Hellenistic artists represented diverse body types in a variety of states – young and old, energised and exhausted, ecstatic and asleep. Looking back to their predecessors, sculptors adopted the contrapposto stance that had become the norm in the Classical period, but they also experimented with extreme poses that took greater advantage of the tensile strength of bronze. Figures were shown moving more fully in three dimensions, with limbs emphatically advanced, heads and bodies dynamically turned. Even figures at rest occupied more space, encouraging viewers to walk around them. This experience of viewer and statue sharing a common space enhanced the understanding of complex imagery and heightened empathy with the subjects depicted.
Reportedly found on the Greek island of Rhodes, this statue of Eros as a sleeping infant departs from Classical images of the deity as a graceful adolescent. For the Hellenistic sculptor, the recumbent Eros, draped limply over a rock, provided a perfect subject for the artistic exploration of a child’s body at rest. The statue may even be a playful inversion of the earlier Greek characterisation of the love god as “limb loosening.” Hellenistic images of Eros as a winged baby inspired many depictions of Cupid in Roman art and, much later, the cherubs and putti of the Renaissance.
Hellenistic artists represented subjects not previously considered worthy of depiction, such as elderly individuals, dysfunctional bodies, and figures from the periphery of society. This stocky, balding old man wears an exomis (short tunic) that identifies him as an artisan. Tucked into his belt is a small notebook that suggests he may not be an ordinary day labourer. Among the identities scholars have proposed for him are the god Hephaistos, the mythical craftsman-engineer Daidalos, and the famous fifth-century B.C. sculptor Pheidias. The statuette is said to have been found at the site of Cherchel in Algeria.
Male Torso 300-200 B.C. Bronze H 152cm; W 52cm; D 68cm The Hellenic Ministry of Culture, Education and Religious Affairs. The Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities, Athens
In 2004 this torso was accidentally netted by fishermen at a depth of five hundred meters near the Greek island of Kythnos in the Aegean Sea. The absence of attributes leaves the figure’s identity open: he could be an athlete, a hero, or even a god. The position of his left hand suggests that he held a flat object, perhaps a discus or a scabbard. The artist realistically rendered the body’s anatomical details as well as the texture and creases of the skin.
Victorious Athlete, “The Getty Bronze” 300-100 B.C. Greek Bronze and copper H: 151.5 x W: 70 x D: 27.9cm (59 5/8 x 27 9/16 x 11 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum
Victorious Athlete, “The Getty Bronze” (detail) 300-100 B.C. Greek Bronze and copper H: 151.5 x W: 70 x D: 27.9cm (59 5/8 x 27 9/16 x 11 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum
Italian fishermen recovered this bronze from the depths of the Adriatic Sea in the early 1960s. Commemorating a successful athlete, the figure stands in the conventional pose of a victor: he is about to remove his victory wreath and dedicate it to the gods in gratitude. The rendering of the nude body, with its rounded volumes and softly swelling forms, is a subtle description of male post-adolescence. The face is less idealised, seeming to convey the distinct features of a real individual.
Herakles Epitrapezios 100 B.C. – A.D. 79 Bronze and limestone H 75cm (95cm with base); W of base 67cm; D of base 54cm Soprintendenza per i Beni Archeologici di Napoli Su concessione del Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo – Soprintendenza per i Beni Archeologici di Napoli – Foto Giorgio Albano
Excavated in 1902 in a suburban villa just outside Pompeii, this figure of Herakles seated on a rock is one of dozens of this type to survive. They range in scale from miniature to colossal, and the composition has been associated with Lysippos based on ancient descriptions. Both Martial and Statius, Roman writers of the late first century A.D., recount attending a dinner hosted by the collector Novius Vindex, who showed them a statuette of Herakles Epitrapezios (At / Upon the Table) created by Lysippos. Martial describes the “small bronze statue of a large god,” and Statius further contrasts its small size with the enormity of the subject represented: “How great was the experience of that learned artist in the details of his art, endowing him with the ingenuity to fashion a table ornament but at the same time to conceive a colossus.”
The brutal realism of this boxer – a man who has received many violent blows and is ready to deal them himself – is designed to arouse empathy in the viewer. Copper inlays line the cuts of the skin and represent dripping blood. The swollen right cheekbone was cast in a different alloy (containing less tin), imitating the discolouration of a hematoma. While the face expresses physical and mental exhaustion after a fight, the boxer’s body is toned and strong, showing few signs of age, and his hair and beard are neatly coiffed. Excavated in 1885 on the south side of the Quirinal Hill in Rome, this statue was found carefully deposited in the foundations of an ancient building. Originally, the figure would have been erected in a Greek sanctuary or displayed publicly in the hometown of the athlete it commemorated.
A New Realism: Images of the Gods
Statues of divinities, an important genre in Archaic and Classical Greek art, remained significant in the Hellenistic period, especially as new shrines were established in new cities. The expressive capabilities of bronze and the dynamic styles of Hellenistic sculpture were adapted to representations of divine beings. Indeed, it seems to have been expected that the gods be depicted in the most up-to-date manner, and thus their images, like those of mortals, sometimes became less ideal and more “realistic” or “human.” Athena, for example, was portrayed as a young maiden as well as a formidable warrior; Eros, an elegant adolescent in Classical art, was shown as a pudgy infant. Deities were now thought of and represented more as living beings – in touch with human experience and with changing physical and emotional states.
Athena “The Minerva of Arezzo” 300-270 B.C. Bronze and copper H 155cm; W 50cm; D 50cm Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Firenze (Soprintendenza per i Beni Archeologici della Toscana)
Wearing a protective aegis with a Gorgon’s head, the goddess of war and wisdom probably held a spear in her right hand. An owl decorates her helmet; most of the serpent on top is modern restoration. Athena’s lips are plated with copper, and her eyes were originally inlaid to achieve a more lifelike appearance. This statue is a variant of a popular type invented in the fourth century B.C., but technical features – the composition of the alloy, casting process, and assembly method – suggest a date in the early third century B.C. Discovered in fragments in the remains of an ancient Roman house at Arezzo, Italy, in 1541, the sculpture was acquired by the Medici and brought to Florence. The gray epoxy-resin fills were added in a recent conservation treatment.
Head of Apollo 50 B.C. – A.D. 50 Bronze H 51cm; W40cm; D 38cm H of the face 23cm Province of Salerno – Museums Sector Image courtesy of Archivio Fotografico del Settore Musei e Biblioteche della Provincia di Salerno – Foto Gaetano Guida
Found in 1930 by Italian fishermen dragging their nets in the Gulf of Salerno, this monumental head of the god Apollo probably belonged to a statue installed in an ancient building or precinct along the coastal bluffs. While the idealised face shares much with Classical antecedents, the extreme turn of the neck and the exuberant locks of hair (many of which were individually cast and attached) are more typical of Hellenistic sculpture.
Head of a God or Poet 100-1 B.C. Bronze H 29cm The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Museum purchase funded by Isabel B. and Wallace S. Wilson, 2001
Cast in several pieces, this head is marked by its strong individualism, yet the identity of the figure remains uncertain. The fillet in the hair suggests a god but is also a common attribute of poets such as Homer. While the furrowed brow, sunken cheeks, and bags under the eyes characterise an older man, the luxuriant beard and full mouth, with lips parted as if to speak, convey power. Pronounced asymmetries indicate that the head was turned energetically to its left and – with the neck stretched forward – may have belonged to a seated figure. Paternal deities such as Poseidon or Asklepios were commonly depicted in a seated position, a format likewise employed for portraits of intellectuals.
Apoxyomenos and the Art of Replication
Although rarely surviving today, multiple bronze versions of the same work were the norm in antiquity. Statues honouring victorious athletes, for example, were likely commissioned in a first edition of two: one to be dedicated in the sanctuary where the competition was held, and the other for display in the winner’s proud hometown.
The figure of an athlete holding a strigil (a curved blade used to scrape oil and dirt off the skin) is often referred to as an apoxyomenos (scraper). The three bronze replicas in this room – two full statues and one head – are not first editions but late Hellenistic or early Roman Imperial copies of a statue created in the 300s B.C., probably by a prominent sculptor. The original must have been so famous that it was still reproduced centuries later. An additional ten replicas in marble and dark stone further attest to its reputation. The exact relationship of the bronze copies to the original and to one another remains to be investigated by comparing their technique, metallurgy, and craftsmanship.
During Austrian excavations at Ephesos (in present-day Turkey) in 1896, this bronze sculpture was found broken into 234 fragments. Previously thought to be an athlete scraping his skin with a strigil – a literal apoxyomenos – the figure is better understood as cleaning the strigil by running the fingers of his left hand over the blade. The statue is widely accepted as an early Roman Imperial replica of a famed Greek work created in the late fourth century B.C., which has been variously attributed to the school of Polykleitos, to Daidalos, or to Lysippos. The circular plinth is modern but of a type used for mounting bronze sculptures in Roman times.
Athlete “The Croatian Apoxyomenos” 100-1 B.C. Greek Bronze and copper H 192cm; W 50cm; D 40cm Head H 29cm Bronze plinth H 7.8cm Republic of Croatia, Ministry of Culture
Athlete “The Croatian Apoxyomenos” (detail) 100-1 B.C. Greek Bronze and copper H 192cm; W 50cm; D 40cm Head H 29cm Bronze plinth H 7.8cm Republic of Croatia, Ministry of Culture
Head of an Athlete Ephesian Apoxyomenos type 200-1 B.C. Greek Bronze and copper H 29.2cm; W 21cm; D 27.3cm The Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas Image courtesy of Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas/Scala, Firenze
This head of an apoxyomenos has been known since the 1700s, when it was part of a private collection in Venice. The rendering of the hair – with rows of finely delineated strands swept from the forehead in different directions – creates the realistically disheveled look of an athlete still sweating after a competition. A distinctive technique was used to attach the head to the now-missing body: the join runs beneath the chin and jaw and follows the hairline behind the ears to the base of the skull. Like the head of the Croatian Apoxyomenos, this head rested on the neck by means of an interior bronze ledge, which was practically invisible from the front.
When Pathos Became Form: Likeness and Expression
Realistic features and emotional states are hallmarks of Hellenistic sculpture. Whether depicting fresh youth or withered age, stoic calm or attention to cares, individualised portraits superseded the largely idealised types of earlier periods through details such as soft, rolling flesh, furrowed brows, and crow’s-feet. Personal traits were even given to fictive portraits of historical figures such as Homer and other significant literati of the past.
Pathos – lived experience – came to be represented physically, and naturalistic, expressive forms soon became formulas. Hellenistic conventions of balancing pathos with the ideal were borrowed by sculptors working in Italy for both Etruscan and Roman Republican patrons, spreading Greek styles to the West just as Alexander and his successors had in the East. Realism was also applied to images of foreigners and figures on the margins of society – new subjects that further broadened the sculptural genres of the period.
Portrait of a Man about 100 B.C. Greek, from Delos Bronze, copper, glass, and stone H: 32.5 x W: 22 x D: 22cm (12 13/16 x 8 11/16 x 8 11/16 in.) Image courtesy of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture, Education and Religious Affairs. The National Archaeological Museum, Athens Photo: Marie Mauzy/Art Resource, NY
Portrait of a Man (detail) about 100 B.C. Greek, from Delos Bronze, copper, glass, and stone H: 32.5 x W: 22 x D: 22cm (12 13/16 x 8 11/16 x 8 11/16 in.) Image courtesy of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture, Education and Religious Affairs. The National Archaeological Museum, Athens Photo: Marie Mauzy/Art Resource, NY
Highly individualised, this beardless male head epitomises the intense realism employed by Greek artists in the late Hellenistic period. The portrait was once part of a full-length statue, and its dynamic turn to the left would have further enhanced the pathos of the expression. Both inserted eyes are preserved, giving a vivid impression of the original appearance of portraits that have lost them. Found in 1912 at the Granite Palaistra on the Greek island of Delos, the head likely belonged to an honorific statue of a citizen displayed in or near the palaistra, a training ground for athletes.
Discovered in the 1620s at Smyrna (present-day Izmir, in western Turkey), this portrait originally had inset eyes, and the open mouth may have contained silvered teeth. Its copper lips are still preserved. The graphic realism of the wrinkled face, the interest in characterising old age, and the heightened emotional expression embody Hellenistic style, yet the locks of hair are neatly arranged in a Classical fashion. The full beard, long hair, and round fillet on the head are attributes of Greek poets, playwrights, and other intellectuals.
Excavated in 1861 near the Temple of Apollo at Cyrene (in present-day Libya) along with fragments of a gilt-bronze horse, this head represents an indigenous Libyan or Berber. High cheekbones, crow’s-feet at the eyes, and a short beard contribute to the image’s realism. The full lips, inset with copper, are slightly parted to reveal bone teeth, and the inlaid eyes, outlined with copper lashes, preserve traces of white enamel. The portrait’s distinctive features demonstrate the widespread popularity of Greek-style works as well as Hellenistic artists’ interest in depicting different ethnic characteristics.
Portrait of a Man About 150 B.C. Marble H 40.7cm; W 25cm; D 31.7cm The J. Paul Getty Museum
Drapery at the back of the neck suggests that this over-life-size head belonged to a full-length figure wearing a cloak – possibly a hero, a king, or a benefactor. Although carved in marble, the portrait displays traits associated with bronze sculpture: sharply outlined lips, rendered as if inset in copper, and finely incised eyebrows, moustache, and beard. The fleshy neck and highly modelled forehead and cheeks are also features of Hellenistic bronzes, and similarly derive from prototypes worked in softer materials such as clay or wax.
The idealised features of this head and the arrangement of the hair reflect pre-Hellenistic traditions of Greek sculpture. The short bangs and the large, compass-drawn pupils, however, are distinctly Etruscan, as is the beard stubble, which seems to have been employed in central Italian portraiture to express strength and wisdom. Reportedly found on an island in Lake Bolsena, Italy, in 1771, this sculpture may have been produced by a workshop in nearby Volsinii (present-day Orvieto). According to ancient sources, Roman soldiers plundered two thousand bronzes when they sacked that city in 265 B.C.
Portrait of a Man About 300 B.C. Bronze, copper, and glass H 26.8cm; W 21.8cm; D 23.5cm Bibliothèque nationale de France
Found near San Giovanni Lipioni in central Italy, this portrait has been linked with Rome’s conquest of the region of Samnium, but whether it depicts a Roman general or a local leader remains uncertain. The crown of the head, now lost, was separately cast. Glass-paste eyes are set between copper lashes, and the lips too are copper. As on the Head of a Votive Statue, a faint beard is indicated. The cubic shape of the head, the flat facial planes, and the distinctive forward comb of the hair situate this sculpture within an Etrusco-Italic artistic tradition.
Wearing a long cloak that envelops both arms and hands, this figure was discovered in 1958 along the beach of Hierapetra, on the Greek island of Crete. Its original context and function remain uncertain, and the subject’s identity is unknown. Distinguished by the individualised, almost petulant face and elaborate sandals, the portrait may have been intended to honour a local youth of high status.
Said to be from Rhodes, a Greek island noted for its skilled bronze workers, this graceful figure was assembled from at least seven separately cast parts: two arms, two legs, the torso and head, and two sections of drapery. Apparently intended to be seen from below, the statue may have been erected on a tall base and set into a niche. The comma-shaped curls over the forehead echo portraits of the Roman imperial family, but the garment is Greek. The boy may have been a young member of the local aristocracy.
Portrait of a Man 100 – 1 B.C. Bronze H 43cm; W 26cm; D 25cm Soprintendenza per i Beni Archeologici di Napoli Su concessione del Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo – Soprintendenza per i Beni Archeologici di Napoli Foto Giorgio Albano
This portrait of an anonymous older man is distinguished by its meticulous characterisation of the hair, eyebrows, and beard. These features were worked into the wax model before casting, using different techniques and tools including a pointed modelling knife, a multi-pronged instrument, and a pen-like device. The asymmetry of the face and neck muscles suggests that the head was originally turned further to its right. The current orientation is the creation of a Renaissance restorer, who transformed the ancient fragment into a bust.
Editions of the Past / Retrospective Styles
Retrospection, or the borrowing of earlier forms and styles, appears to have begun as early as the fifth century B.C. It continued into Hellenistic and early Roman Imperial times, when sculptors regularly employed and adapted Archaic and Classical features, sometimes eclectically, to recall the art of previous periods. Throughout the second century B.C., conquering Roman generals took original Greek art back to Rome, where it was paraded in triumphal processions, dedicated in temples, erected in civic spaces, and displayed in elite homes. To satisfy an eager market, Greek artists flocked to Rome and produced new works emulating older ones, often taking advantage of bronze as an ideal medium for replication and serial production. Statues in Archaic style were created not only to appeal to the interests of antiquarian collectors but also to evoke the religious piety of a bygone age. The Classical style came to be favoured by the emperor Augustus for much of his official art, as it conjured the golden age of Athens.
Herm Bust of the Doryphoros 50-1 B.C. Bronze H 58cm; W 66cm; D 27cm Inscribed in Greek: “Apollonios, son of Archias, of Athens, made [this]” Soprintendenza per i Beni Archeologici di Napoli Su concessione del Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo – Soprintendenza per i Beni Archeologici di Napoli Foto Luigi Spina
The Doryphoros was a famous full-length statue of a heroic spear bearer created by the fifth-century B.C. Greek sculptor Polykleitos. This herm bust, which excerpts just the head and chest of that figure, is considered one of the most accurate surviving replicas, capturing the finely incised hair and idealised facial features of the now-lost original; its eyes are eighteenth-century restorations. The bust was found amid an extensive collection of sculpture that decorated the Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum. The artist Apollonios of Athens added his signature in Greek along the front, advertising his skill and guaranteeing the authenticity of his work for his Roman patron.
The wreath of wild olive suggests that this figure is a victorious athlete, and the form of the bust indicates that it was set atop the pillar of a herm. The precise arrangement and striations of the hair are reminiscent of works by the fifth-century B.C. sculptor Polykleitos, but the melancholy expression and the delicate appearance of the face are characteristic of first-century B.C. Roman creations made in Classical Greek style. Found in Herculaneum, this bust was given by King Ferdinand II to the Pedicini family of Beneventum and subsequently sold to the emperor Napoleon III in the 1800s.
With its stiff posture and left foot placed forward, this figure of a nude male youth looks like an Archaic Greek kouros. Yet the smooth musculature, relatively slender limbs, and treatment of the hands and feet appear more naturalistic than original Archaic kouroi, which functioned as religious dedications and grave markers in the sixth century B.C. A pseudo-Archaic votive inscription to Athena on the left foot, now only partially legible, indicates that this statue too was intended as an offering in a sanctuary. Another inscription on a lead tablet found inside the bronze links it to the Greek island of Rhodes. The statue was eventually transported to Italy and lost when the ship carrying it foundered in port at Piombino, where the figure was discovered in 1832.
Torso of a Youth “The Vani Torso” 200 – 100 B.C. Bronze H 105cm; W 45cm; D 25cm Georgian National Museum, Vani Archaeological Museum-Reserve Photo: Rob Harrell, Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
Boy Removing a Thorn from His Foot “The Spinario” About 50 B.C. Bronze and copper H 73cm Musei Capitolini, Rome, 1186 Image courtesy of Archivio Fotografico dei Musei Capitolini, Palazzo dei Conservatori, Sala dei Trionfi – foto Zeno Colantoni
The lithe body and naturalistic pose of this boy contrast with the highly stylised face and hair, and the fall of the hair does not correspond to gravity given the inclination of the head. Other versions of the sculpture (no. 54) confirm that this bronze combines a Hellenistic body with an early-fifth-century B.C. head type originally intended for another figure. Such eclecticism is characteristic of late Hellenistic and early Roman Imperial sculpture. This statue seems never to have been buried underground and has been famous in Rome since medieval times, inspiring artists for centuries.
Boy with Thorn, also called Fedele (Fedelino) or Spinario, is a Greco-Roman Hellenistic bronze sculpture of a boy withdrawing a thorn from the sole of his foot, now in the Palazzo dei Conservatori, Rome. A Roman marble of this subject from the Medici collections is in a corridor of the Uffizi Gallery, Florence.
The sculpture was one of the very few Roman bronzes that was never lost to sight. It was standing outside the Lateran Palace when the Navarrese rabbi Benjamin of Tudela saw it in the 1160s and identified it as Absalom, who “was without blemish from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head.” It was noted in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century by the English visitor, Magister Gregorius, who noted in his De mirabilibus urbis Romae that it was ridiculously thought to be Priapus.It must have been one of the sculptures transferred to the Palazzo dei Conservatori by Pope Sixtus IV in the 1470s, though it is not recorded there until 1499-1500.It was celebrated in the Early Renaissance, one of the first Roman sculptures to be copied: there are bronze reductions by Severo da Ravenna and Jacopo Buonaccolsi, called “L’Antico” for his refined classicising figures: he made a copy for Isabella d’Este about 1501and followed it with an untraced pendant that perhaps reversed the pose. For a fountain of 1500 in Messina, Antonello Gagini made a full-size variant, probably the bronze that is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Curators: Penelope Curtis, Director, Tate Britain and Chris Stephens, Lead Curator, Modern British Art and Head of Displays with Assistant Curator Inga Fraser and Sophie Bowness, the artist’s granddaughter
Sculptor Barbara Hepworth
A national treasure. An old soul.
My favourite period of Hepworth’s is the 1940s-1950s, when she found her true voice as an artist. Working with wood, inspired by the landscape, she carved into the space of form / the form of space. She was a master of inner space. The sculptures with string are like harps, they resonate with the energy of life, sea, rock, wind and become … oracles, evidencing some deep inner knowledge. My god, what an artist. Underrated by some but to those that know, a magical voice of becoming.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Tate for allowing me to publish the art works in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for a Modern World exhibition banner
Pelagos (‘sea’ in Greek) was inspired by a view of the bay at St Ives in Cornwall, where two arms of land enfold the sea on either side. The hollowed-out wood has a spiral formation resembling a shell, a wave or the roll of a hill. Hepworth wanted the taut strings to express ‘the tension I felt between myself and the sea, the wind or the hills’. She moved to Cornwall with her husband Ben Nicholson in 1939, and produced some of her finest sculpture in its wild landscape.
Barbara Hepworth (British, 1903-1975) Oval Sculpture (No. 2) 1943, cast 1958 Plaster on wooden base 293 x 400 x 255mm Tate Presented by the artist 1967
In the 1930s Barbara Hepworth and her husband Ben Nicholson were members of the London-based avant-garde. Shortly before the outbreak of war they moved to Cornwall with their children. Running a nursery school and living in cramped conditions reduced Hepworth’s output of sculpture to a minimum. In 1943, the family moved to larger accommodation with studio space. Hepworth’s abstract forms, which seem akin to caves and shells, were affected by the Cornish landscape. Her response to nature was not romantic or mystical but more firmly based on actual observation. Circles and spheres had dominated her work. These were replaced by ovals which gave her sculptures two centres rather than one, complicating their interior form.
Tate Britain will open the first London museum retrospective for five decades of the work of Barbara Hepworth, one of Britain’s greatest artists. Barbara Hepworth (1903-1975) was a leading figure of the international modern art movement in the 1930s, and one of the most successful sculptors in the world during the 1950s and 1960s. This major retrospective opens on 24 June 2015 and will emphasise Hepworth’s often overlooked prominence in the international art world. It will highlight the different contexts and spaces in which Hepworth presented her work, from the studio to the landscape.
The exhibition will feature over 70 works by Hepworth from major carvings and bronzes to less-familiar works and those by other artists. It opens with Hepworth’s earliest surviving carvings from the 1920s alongside works by predecessors and peers artists from Jacob Epstein to Henry Moore. The selection reveals how her work related to a wider culture of wood and stone carving between the wars when Hepworth studied at Leeds Art School and at the Royal College of Art.
Hepworth and her second husband Ben Nicholson made works in dialogue and photographed their studio in Hampstead, London in order to reinforce the idea of a common practice integrated into a way of life. Major carvings like Kneeling Figure, 1932 (rosewood) and Large and Small Form, 1934 (alabaster) will be shown with paintings, prints and drawings by Nicholson, and rarely seen works by Hepworth including textiles, drawings, collages and photograms. Archival photographs will show the two artists and their works in the studio demonstrating their integrated life of art and craft.
In the later 1930s, Hepworth made more purely abstract work as part of an international movement disseminated through magazines and exhibitions. A display of the majority of Hepworth’s surviving carvings of this period will include Discs in Echelon 1935 (padouk wood) and Single Form 1937 (lignum vitae) which will be seen in conjunction with the journals in which they featured alongside the work of artists such as Alberto Giacometti and Piet Mondrian.
In the mid-1940s, Hepworth, in St Ives, Cornwall, began making sculptures in wood that expressed her response to her new surroundings. These will be set alongside her two-dimensional work: the abstract works on paper of the early 1940s and her figurative ‘hospital drawings’ of 1947-48, both expressing utopian ideals. A selection of photographs and film will consider the different ways in which Hepworth’s sculpture was presented or imagined – in landscape, in a gallery, in the garden and on stage – and the impact such variant stagings have on the work’s interpretation.
One room will reunite four large carvings in the sumptuous African hardwood guarea, made in 1954-5, which are probably the highpoint of Hepworth’s carving career. In the post-war period, Hepworth’s sculpture became a prominent part of the international art scene. This will be evoked through a focus on her retrospective at the Kröller-Müller Museum in 1965 and the display of bronzes that inaugurated the Museum’s reconstructed Rietveld Pavilion.
Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for a Modern World is curated by Penelope Curtis, Director, Tate Britain and Chris Stephens, Lead Curator, Modern British Art and Head of Displays with Assistant Curator Inga Fraser and Sophie Bowness, the artist’s granddaughter. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue. It will tour to the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo in the Netherlands from November 2015 to April 2016 and to the Arp Museum, Rolandseck in Germany from May to August 2016.
Press release from the Tate Britain website
Barbara Hepworth at Tate Britain
Barbara Hepworth helped to reshape sculpture in post-war Britain, experimenting with abstract forms and piercing holes through her works to play with light and shade. Alastair Sooke takes a look at Tate Britain’s remarkable retrospective which displays magnificent bronzes and intimate, personal carvings.
Barbara Hepworth – Figures in a Landscape (1953) – extract
Narrated by future Poet Laureate Cecil Day Lewis, Figures in a Landscape offers a poetic portrait of sculptor Barbara Hepworth and the otherworldly Cornwall landscapes that inspired her work. Priaulx Rainier’s haunting score beautifully complements the extraordinary works of art, placed in the Cornish spaces that influenced them. Hepworth had been commissioned to design sculptures for the Festival of Britain two years before this film, and remains one of Britain’s most celebrated sculptors – she was made a Dame in 1965. She died during a fire at her St. Ives studio in 1975.
~ Alex Davidson
Barbara Hepworth’s Sculpture Garden | TateShots
Barbara Hepworth first came to live in Cornwall with her husband Ben Nicholson and their young family at the outbreak of war in 1939. She lived and worked in Trewyn studios, now the Hepworth Museum, from 1949 until her death in 1975.
TateShots travelled to St Ives to explore the studio and its gardens, where Hepworth’s sculptures are seen in the environment for which they were created. ‘Finding Trewyn Studio was a sort of magic’, wrote Hepworth; ‘here was a studio, a yard and garden where I could work in open air and space’. The film includes archival footage from an interview with the artist from 1973.
Who is Barbara Hepworth?
3 June 2015
Who is she?
Barbara Hepworth was a British sculptor, who was born in Wakefield, Yorkshire in 1903. She was a leading figure in the international art scene throughout a career spanning five decades.
Who were her peers?
Hepworth studied at Leeds school of Art from 1920-1921 alongside fellow Yorkshire-born artist Henry Moore. Both students continued their studies in sculpture at the Royal College of Art in London. Both became leading practitioners of the avant-garde method of Direct Carving (working directly in to the chosen material) avoiding the more traditional process of making preparatory models and maquettes from which a craftsman would produce the finished work.
From 1924 Hepworth spent two years in Italy, and in 1925 married her first husband, the artist John Skeaping, in Florence; their marriage was to last until 1931.
From 1932, she lived with the painter Ben Nicholson and, for a number of years, the two artists made work in close proximity to each other, developing a way of working that was almost like a collaboration. They spent periods of time travelling throughout Europe, and it was here that Hepworth met Georges Braque and Piet Mondrian, and visited the studios of Picasso, Constantin Brancusi, and Jean Arp and Sophie Taueber-Arp. The experience was a hugely exciting one for Hepworth, for she not only found herself in the studios of some of Europe’s most influential artists, which helped her to approach her own career with renewed vigour and clarity, but also found there mutual respect. The School of Paris had a lasting effect on both Hepworth and Nicholson as they became key figures in an international network of abstract artists.
By now married and with triplets as well as a son from her first marriage, when war broke out in 1939, Hepworth and Nicholson moved to St Ives. Though she didn’t know it, the seaside town would remain her home for their rest of her life, and after the war she and Nicholson became a hub for a generation of younger emerging British artists such as Peter Lanyon, Roger Hilton and Terry Frost – who was Hepworth’s studio assistant for a time. As she had found, the wild beauty of the surrounding terrain offered a counter to the disruption and destruction of the war. And, like her, those artists made paintings and sculptures inspired by the place and the forces and their experience of nature.
Though concerned with form and abstraction, Hepworth’s art was primarily about relationships: not merely between two forms presented side-by-side, but between the human figure and the landscape, colour and texture, and most importantly between people at an individual and social level.
What’s her legacy?
Barbara Hepworth’s name is still intertwined with the history and culture of St Ives and her studio and sculpture Garden remain one of the town’s most popular destinations. In the town where Hepworth was born, as well as housing a rich archive of the artist’s work and serving as a platform for contemporary artists working today, The Hepworth Wakefield also pays lasting homage to an artist who spoke frequently of the effect her surroundings had on her formative years.
The whole of this Yorkshire background means more to me as the years have passed. I draw on these early experiences not only visually in texture and contour, but humanly. The importance of man in landscape was stressed by the seeming contradiction of the industrial town springing out of the inner beauty of the country.
In her lifetime, however, she was also a major international figure, showing her work in exhibitions around the globe. As a woman in a largely male-dominated art-world, Hepworth took an active role in the way her work was presented. She was particular about documentation of her works, and collaborated closely with others. She established innovative ways to push the boundaries of her technique and thematic investigations and sustained a career that saw her mount a retrospective at Kröller-Müller Museum in 1965, represent Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1950 and won first prize at the São Paulo Bienal in 1959. She has influenced countless artists, designers, architects and performers such as Linder Sterling, Peter Jensen and Rebecca Warren citing her as an influential figure in their own creative practice.
Hepworth is known first and foremost as a sculptor, but she also worked in other mediums – and was very interested in documenting her own work through photography. The landscape around St Ives became part of the way her works were presented in the media; St Ives Bay, Godrevy Lighthouse and The Island all become compositional tools for those documenting her works, creating an additional dialogue between the forms and their surroundings.
From 1947-1949, during an illness her daughter suffered, Hepworth produced a series of drawings and paintings based on her time observing doctors and surgeons at St Mary’s hospital in Exeter. Read about their creation in Tate Etc. magazine
What do the critics say?
No militant feminist herself, she asked simply to be treated as a sculptor (never a sculptress), irrespective of sex. ~ Alan Bowness
Hepworth was an artist of extraordinary stature whose importance is still to some extent occluded. Over 50 years, from 1925 to her death in 1975, she made more than 600 works of sculpture remarkable in range and emotional force. ~ Fiona McCarthy
In these works this brave and indefatigable woman transcends the difficulties and ugliness of modern life and evokes a vision of radiant calm perfection. ~ Herbert Read
Hepworth in Quotes…
“The sculptor carves because he must. He needs the concrete form of stone and wood for the expression of his idea and experience, and when the idea forms the material is found at once.”
“From the Sculptors point of view one can either be the spectator of the object or the object itself. For a few years I became the object.”
“I think every sculpture must be touched, it’s part of the way you make it and it’s really our first sensibility, it is the sense of feeling, it is first one we have when we’re born. I think every person looking at a sculpture should use his own body. You can’t look at a sculpture if you are going to stand stiff as a ram rod and stare at it, with as sculpture you must walk around it, bend toward it, touch it and walk away from it.”
“I think every person looking at a sculpture should use [their] own body. You can’t look at a sculpture if you’re going to stand stiff as a ramrod and stare at it. With a sculpture you must walk around it [or] bend towards it…”
Text from the Tate Britain website. No longer available online
The original of this bronze was a carved plaster column set on a wooden base. The plaster was sent to Paris in 1938 for an exhibition and remained there until 1961. In 1963 Hepworth had it cast in an edition of seven. By the mid 1930s Hepworth had turned from carving semi-naturalistic figures and animals to an exploration of pure sculptural forms. She has written that her interest then centred on the relationship between a form and its surrounding space as well as its integral size, texture and weight. But these sculptures almost always retained an organic character.
Constellation of artworks in the Hepworth display
This constellation forges connections between modern and contemporary works concerned with a sculptural relationship to the artist’s body and to the natural world, revealing a pathway that links geometric abstraction with the surrealist ability to recognise human shapes in natural forms. The phased development of Single Form (Eikon), as it moved through versions in plaster and wood to its final metal incarnation nearly 30 years later, raises questions about the role of sculpture and the importance of materials – concerns that are echoed in the works of Naum Gabo, Marisa Merz and Max Ernst. Louise Bourgeois’ printmaking suite presents a dark vision of biomorphic assimilation and amputation, while the strength and stability of Hepworth’s direct carving method is echoed on an intimate scale by Merz’s knitted nylon works, whose delicate appearance belies their tough industrial materials.
The geometric abstraction of Hepworth’s monolithic bronze highlights her association with the constructive art championed by Gabo in 1936, which focused on the universal nature of pure forms. She also had connections to the surrealist movement. With its phallic quality and contrasting purified aesthetic, the cast bronze sculpture can relate to both of these important movements; like other works in the constellation powerfully oscillating between abstraction and figuration.
In a strong statement on her own artistic philosophy, Hepworth proclaimed: ‘I think every person looking at a sculpture should use his own body. You can’t look at a sculpture if you are going to stand stiff as a ram rod and stare at it, with a sculpture you must walk around it, bend toward it, touch it and walk away from it.’ This invitation to engage in a bodily experience of sculpture shares its premise with Bruce Nauman’s cast plaster and fibreglass work, Isa Genzken’s totemic concrete monuments, and Daria Martin’s film In the Palace, which dramatically enlarges to architectural scale an iconic Giacometti sculpture, enabling performers to inhabit its time and space, in an uncanny fusing of materials and people.
Text from the Tate Britain website. No longer available online
Valerie Sybil Wilmer (born 7 December 1941) is a British photographer and writer specialising in jazz, gospel, blues, and British African-Caribbean music and culture. Her notable books include Jazz People (1970) and As Serious As Your Life (1977), both first published by Allison and Busby. Wilmer’s autobiography, Mama Said There’d Be Days Like This: My Life in the Jazz World, was published in 1989.
Barbara Hepworth (British, 1903-1975) Sea Form (Porthmeor) 1958 Bronze on wooden base 830 x 1135 x 355mm Tate Presented by the artist 1967
Porthmeor is a beach close to Hepworth’s studio in St Ives, Cornwall. A critic thought this sculpture ‘seems to belong to the living world of the sea.’ However, the curling lip of the bronze is quite a literal representation of a breaking wave. At Porthmeor, Hepworth loved to watch the changing tide, the movement of sand and wind and the footprints of men and birds. For her, the rhythm of the tides was part of a natural order to which humankind also belongs.
Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932) Four Herbariums with groomed Thistels and Delphinium Undated Stiftung Ann und Jürgen Wilde, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich
Karl Blossfeldt’s photographs have been associated with Modernism (Bauhaus), Surrealism and New Objectivity / New Vision.
“Blossfeldt’s factual yet finely detailed imagery was praised by Walter Benjamin, who declared that Karl Blossfeldt ‘has played his part in that great examination of the inventory of perception, which will have an unforeseeable effect on our conception of the world’. He compared him to Maholy-Nagy and the pioneers of New Objectivity, and ranked his achievements alongside the great photographers August Sander and Eugene Atget. The Surrealists also championed him, and George Bataille included his images in the periodical Documents in 1929.” (Wikipedia)
Hailed as a master for discovering a hitherto ‘unknown universe’ and for his exemplary technical feats as a photographer Blossfeldt’s work is, nevertheless, decidedly subjective as author Hanako Murata notes in her excellent essay on the artist Material Forms in Nature: The Photographs of Karl Blossfeldt (2014).
“Not only did he carefully select, arrange, and in some cases physically modify his specimens, but his meticulous attention to detail and image refinement continued throughout each step of production, beginning with his negatives.”1
Blossfeldt uses the logic of the plant and the logic of his mind to achieve his final vision. A/symmetry as art form.
It was Blossfeldt’s conception of the world that created this inventory of perception. He was the human being who recognised these structures, who used the photographs as teaching aids, who saw them as art and a way of restoring the link between man and nature. His vision and his alone. Nothing was left to chance, everything was controlled. You only have to look at his Self portrait, Rome (1895, below) to see that here is a determined man. His body points one way in suit with braces and stiff, high collared shirt, hand clenched at waist while his head snaps towards us with the most incredible stare, almost piercing the viewer with its ferocity. You can still feel that stare after all these decades.
Ranking his photographs alongside that of Sander and Atget is a big call. Personally, too big a call. If I had to put my finger on it, what they lack for me is any form of context in relationship to an externalised nature. They rely on the form of the plant and not its relationship to the world in which it lives. To discover those forms in science and then transfer them to the field of art is a truly inspiring vision that only Blossfeldt had. He manipulated reality to achieve his beautiful, formal re/presentations. But do they take me to the places that Sander and Atget’s photographs do. No. Here is the thing itself, and not what else it can stand for.
Despite their call to Surrealism, their attention to detail leaves the images little room for rumination. Perhaps he took each step of that image refinement too far. Sometimes you need a little chaos in your world order, for the world of pattern cannot exist without randomness and mutation.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Pinakothek der Moderne for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
1/ Hanako Murata. “Material Forms in Nature: The Photographs of Karl Blossfeldt,” in Mitra Abbaspour, Lee Ann Daffner, and Maria Morri Hambourg, eds. Object: Photo. Modern Photographs: The Thomas Walther Collection 1909-1949. An Online Project of The Museum of Modern Art. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2014
“If I give someone a horsetail he will have no difficulty making a photographic enlargement of it – anyone can do that. But to observe it, to notice and discover its forms, is something that only a few are capable of.”
“My botanical documents should contribute to restoring the link with nature. They should reawaken a sense of nature, point to its teeming richness of form, and prompt the viewer to observe for himself the surrounding plant world.”
“The plant never lapses into mere arid functionalism; it fashions and shapes according to logic and suitability, and with its primeval force compels everything to attain the highest artistic form.”
Karl Blossfeldt
“The striking uniformity of Blossfeldt’s photographs suggests an excellent mastery of studio technique, and indeed, for all the prints’ subsequent associations with New Objectivity, Blossfeldt’s work was decidedly subjective, insofar as he was not shy about modifying his subjects or his images to achieve his final vision. Not only did he carefully select, arrange, and in some cases physically modify his specimens, but his meticulous attention to detail and image refinement continued throughout each step of production, beginning with his negatives.”
Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932) Self portrait, Rome 1895 Stiftung Ann und Jürgen Wilde, Pinakothek der Moderne, München
Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932) Self portrait, Rome (detail) 1895 Stiftung Ann und Jürgen Wilde, Pinakothek der Moderne, München
Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932) Nature study (chestnut) 1890s Stiftung Ann und Jürgen Wilde, Pinakothek der Moderne, München
Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932) Papaver orientale. Oriental Poppy Before 1928 Stiftung Ann und Jürgen Wilde, Pinakothek der Moderne, München
The photographs of plants by the university professor and amateur photographer Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932) are among the milestones in the history of 20th-century photography. To mark the 150th anniversary of Blossfeldt’s birth, the Ann and Jürgen Wilde Foundation at the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich is staging a comprehensive exhibition on his life and work.
Focal points of the exhibition are Blossfeldt’s early training as a modeller, his work together with the reformer Moritz Meurer, the photographer’s own handcrafted designs and his teaching at the Königliche Kunstgewerbeschule in Berlin. The preliminary works he made for his seminal publication Urformen der Kunst (Art Forms in Nature) of 1928 and the reception it received at that time, for example at the Bauhaus in Dessau in 1929, form an additional aspect.
The exhibition comprises some 120 photographs, including numerous large-format, historical exhibition prints. Collages of his work, drawings in the artist’s own hand, drafts, archival material and documents render the concept behind Blossfeldt’s teaching and work visible.
The Ann and Jürgen Wilde Foundation manages the Karl Blossfeldt Archive with its unique holdings of original photographs, negatives and documents by Karl Blossfeldt. Together with a large volume of photographs in the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, an exceptionally high-quality presentation of Karl Blossfeldt’s photographic work can now be staged and its development shown by means of historical documents and archival material that have hardly ever been seen by the general public.
Text from the Pinakothek der Moderne website
Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932) Adiantum pedatum. Maidenhair Fern Before 1926 Stiftung Ann und Jürgen Wilde, Pinakothek der Moderne, München
Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932) Eryngium bourgatii. Bourgatis Eryngo Before 1928 Stiftung Ann und Jürgen Wilde, Pinakothek der Moderne, München
Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932) Heracleum sphondylium. Hogweed 1898-1932 Stiftung Ann und Jürgen Wilde, Pinakothek der Moderne, München
Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932)
Karl Blossfeldt (June 13, 1865 – December 9, 1932) was a German photographer, sculptor, teacher, and artist who worked in Berlin, Germany. He is best known for his close-up photographs of plants and living things, published in 1929 as, Urformen der Kunst.He was inspired, as was his father, by nature and the way in which plants grow. He believed that ‘the plant must be valued as a totally artistic and architectural structure.’ Among his students at the Berlin Arts and Crafts School was Heinz Warneke.From 1924, he was professor at the Vereinigte Staatsschulen für freie und angewandete Kunst (United State School for Fine and Applied Art) in Berlin.
Blossfeldt made many of his photographs with a home-made camera that could magnify the subject up to thirty times its size, revealing details within a plant’s natural structure. Appointed for a teaching post at the Institute of Royal Arts Museum in 1898 (where he remained until 1930), he established an archive for his photographs. Blossfeldt never received formal training in photography. Blossfeldt developed a series of home-made cameras that allowed him to photograph plant surfaces in unprecedented magnified detail. This reflected his enduring interest in the repetitive patterns found in nature’s textures and forms.
In Berlin from the late nineteenth century until his death, Blossfeldt’s works were primarily used as teaching tools and were brought to public attention in 1928 by his first publication Urformen der Kunst (Art Forms in Nature). Published in 1928 when Blossfeldt was 63 and a professor of applied art at the Berliner Kunsthochschule (Berlin Academy of Art), Urformen der Kunst quickly became an international bestseller and in turn, made Blossfeldt famous almost overnight. His contemporaries were impressed by the abstract shapes and structures in nature that he revealed. Swiftly regarded as a seminal book on photography, Blossfeldt’s factual yet finely detailed imagery was praised by Walter Benjamin, who declared that Karl Blossfeldt ‘has played his part in that great examination of the inventory of perception, which will have an unforeseeable effect on our conception of the world’. He compared him to Maholy-Nagy and the pioneers of New Objectivity, and ranked his achievements alongside the great photographers August Sander and Eugene Atget. The Surrealists also championed him, and George Bataille included his images in the periodical Documents in 1929.
In 2001 Urformen der Kunst was included in “The Book of 101 Books” as one of the seminal photographic books of the twentieth century.
“The untold want by life and land ne’er granted, Now, voyager, sail thou forth, to seek and find.”
Walt Whitman (1819-1892). “Untold Want,” from Leaves of Grass. 1900
Joseph Cornell is my favourite artist who has ever lived on this Earth. I do not make this observation lightly, but after much consideration, thought and reflection.
I have always loved his work, from the very first time I saw it in a book. To then see a recreation of one of his 1950s exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2001 was one of those seminal moments where you are lifted out of yourself, where your life becomes forever changed. For me that transcendent experience is up there with being alone with the Rembrandt portraits in the Louvre for 10 precious minutes. Both were among the most exquisite, poignant and beautiful spiritual experiences I have had in my life.
I am not an expert on Cornell, although I have read many books on his work and on his spirituality. He saw himself as an “armchair voyager”, a bit like a latter day Baudelaire, a man who has romantic notions of travel but never actually goes anywhere, who has romantic notions of love but never finds it, except in his imagination. Cornell never left his native New York. Cornell expressed his self through a passion for the artefacts he collected, through his assemblage of those artefacts into magical boxes that addressed unrequited love and faith – for Hollywood and movie stars, ballerinas, hotels, birds, the Renaissance, princes and princesses, the stars, games and chance. He was an avid collector, rummaging through the junk shops of New York and storing his collectibles for his art, something to which I have an affinity, being an avid op shopper (or thrift shopper) myself.
Here I can see an association with the words of Walt Whitman in his lines “Untold Want” from Leaves of Grass, those lines forming the title for the book upon which the film Now Voyager (1942) with Bette Davis was based. “The untold want” of Whitman’s lines are whatever you yearn for and cannot get in the social context (“life”) and place (“land”) where you are born. Whitman says, stop “studying the charts,” and “now obey, thy cherish’d, secret wish,” – in other words he’s saying that your heart’s desire is the best indicator of where your destiny lies, but it is possible to miss out on it by not going for it. Fast forward to Now Voyager where frumpy Bette Davis has an affair with a married man, becomes independent, defies her tyrannical mother who promptly dies, and ends up circuitously looking after her lover’s daughter. They decide to have a platonic relationship “sustaining a romantic, unconsummated relationship and creating a ‘family’ by becoming the surrogate, adoptive care-giver for his daughter.”
There is a specific desire here. Davis and Whitman are freed to love without restriction in a romantic way, and after the end of Now Voyager, perhaps Cornell is channelling Bette Davis. He loved in his mind, he created boxes in his imagination (and then physically), he astral travelled through the stars, he created games of chance (such as penny arcades and slot machines) and shooting galleries (that exposed his inner mind) letting the air rush out into the world. He created surreality itself but he was never surreal, for his work is always based on the collision of realities. His boxes are tiny cosmos, like the Tardis from Dr Who, the interior (under a microscope, within four walls) larger than the exterior … yet, magically, they inhabit the whole world, they inhabit our mind. He used the alchemical reaction of elements, the elementary, to affect travel, love, life and change. And he did it in four dimensions for his boxes affect us as much today as he did when he created them. Perhaps that is why I like his work so much… he used seemingly mundane materials, multi/media objects, imagination and love to let’s our spirits soar into the universe. No other artist has ever affected me so much. No one ever will.
Undeniably, Cornell’s poetic theatres are joyous creations that free our soul from the everyday.
Perhaps it is through love, or in death, or the afterlife, that the Voyager can seek that untold want.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
My Mind to me a Kingdom Is
Sir Edward Dyer (1543-1607)
1 My mind to me a kingdom is; 2 Such perfect joy therein I find 3 That it excels all other bliss 4 Which God or nature hath assign’d. 5 Though much I want that most would have, 6 Yet still my mind forbids to crave.
7 No princely port, nor wealthy store, 8 No force to win a victory, 9 No wily wit to salve a sore, 10 No shape to win a loving eye; 11 To none of these I yield as thrall, – 12 For why? my mind despise them all.
13 I see that plenty surfeit oft, 14 And hasty climbers soonest fall; 15 I see that such as are aloft 16 Mishap doth threaten most of all. 17 These get with toil and keep with fear; 18 Such cares my mind can never bear.
19 I press to bear no haughty sway, 20 I wish no more than may suffice, 21 I do no more than well I may, 22 Look, what I want my mind supplies. 23 Lo ! thus I triumph like a king, 24 My mind content with anything.
25 I laugh not at another’s loss, 26 Nor grudge not at another’s gain; 27 No worldly waves my mind can toss; 28 I brook that is another’s bane. 29 I fear no foe, nor fawn on friend, 30 I loathe not life, nor dread mine end.
31 My wealth is health and perfect ease, 32 And conscience clear my chief defence; 33 I never seek by bribes to please, 34 Nor by desert to give offence. 35 Thus do I live, thus will I die, – 36 Would all did so as well as I!
“Beauty should be shared for it enhances our joys. To explore its mystery is to venture towards the sublime.”
“Life can have significance even if it appears to be a series of failures.”
Joseph Cornell
Bette Davis ~ Don’t Let’s Ask For The Moon (Now Voyager 1942)
“Cornell was a voyager, travelling through space and time to dimensions of the imagination and the spirit. He infused this sense of adventure and an infinite beyond into modestly scaled works whose fragments of reality give way to worlds to be explored.”
Robert Lehrman, Joseph Cornell: Shadowplay Eterniday, 2003
“White is just what I mean. Not monstrously, but in wonderful variations. All I want to perform is white magic.”
Joseph Cornell quoted in Tracking the Marvellous: A Life in the New York Art World, John Bernard Myers, 1984
Unidentified photographer The Cornell family c. 1915 Joseph Cornell (far right) with his parents (Joseph I. Cornell, Sr. and Helen Storms Cornell) and siblings (l to r: Elizabeth, Helen, and Robert) Joseph Cornell papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
“What kind of man is this, who, from old brown cardboard photographs collected in second-hand bookstores, has reconstructed the nineteenth century “grand tour” of Europe for his mind’s eye more vividly than those who took it, who was not born then and has never been abroad, who knows Vesuvius’s look on a certain morning of AD 79, and of the cast-iron balconies of that hotel in Lucerne?”
Robert Motherwell on Joseph Cornell, Joseph Cornell’s Theatre of the Mind, 1993
“He uses selected, sought-for, desired objects. He must have been clipping all the time, poring through magazines, collecting things and haunting junk shops and flea markets, looking for the images that corresponded to his imagination.”
Susan Sontag, Joseph Cornell: Worlds in a Box, directed by Mark Stokes, 1991
“Creative filing Creative arranging As poetics As technique As joyous creation”
Joseph Cornell, diary entry, 9 March 1959
“On the way to ART OF THIS CENTURY from Julien’s, carrying De Medici girl Slot Machine and bird with cracked glass saw Marlene Dietrich in polo coat and black beanie cap on back of hair waiting at curb of Jay Thorpe’s for a taxi. First time I’d seen her off screen and brought an unexpectedly elated feeling. Working in cellar that night on Soap Bubble Set the green glass locket portrait of her on the floor evoked very special feelings.”
Joseph Cornell, diary entry, spring 1944
“Original inspiration of the bird store, windows, simplicity of magic, pet shop.”
Joseph Cornell, c. 1943, Joseph Cornell Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC
“Some of his boxes are less cryptic, and more naturalistic, such as Untitled (Owl Habitat), from the 1940s. The snowy owl trapped behind a pane of glass is not a fancy piece of taxidermy fit for a natural history diorama, but a mere paper illustration pasted onto plywood. The midnight-blue forest the owl inhabits is contrived from painted bark and lichen. Cornell, of course, was himself a famous night owl. In some ways the owl box can seem as close as he ever came to self-portraiture, with its majestic creature alone in the woods, eyes wide, watching.”
The title of our Joseph Cornell exhibition is Wanderlust. Curator Sarah Lea describes how this theme is closely linked to Cornell’s artistic practice, and his travels of the imagination.
Joseph Cornell (1903-1972), born on Christmas Eve in Nyack, New York, remains one of the most enigmatic yet influential American artists of the twentieth century. Almost entirely self-taught as an artist, Cornell lived quietly for most of his life with his mother and younger brother, crafting in the confines of his basement or on the kitchen table the ‘shadow boxes’ for which he is best known.
He rarely travelled, and almost never left New York, yet his work, based on collage and assemblage, resonates with references to foreign places and distant times. In the course of his life he befriended ballerinas, film stars, poets and generations of world-famous artists. He showed in a succession of New York galleries, participated in landmark group shows at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and was honoured before he died with major surveys at the Pasadena Museum of Californian Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
A popular romanticised image of Cornell pervades as an ascetic outsider – a shy, eccentric man yearning for intimacy, unable to converse with the women who enthralled him but with a vibrant interior life of daydreams and an imagination capable of crossing oceans, centuries and the celestial realm. Yet this mythologised version of the man belies his active interest in the art movements of his time, and the innovative nature of his creations which have paved the way for today’s appropriation and installation artists, contemporary collage and archive based practices.
This exhibition at the Royal Academy brings together 80 of Cornell’s most remarkable shadow boxes, assemblages, collages and films, including many works held in private collections and a number never seen before outside of the USA. The first major UK exhibition solely devoted to Cornell in almost 35 years, it presents a rare chance to experience a concentrated survey of his oeuvre, and to journey inside the mind of an artist who described himself as ‘an armchair voyager’. The ‘wanderlust’ referenced in the exhibition title – the desire to explore and travel the world – is central to Cornell’s art, as was his penchant for collecting and his astonishingly wide-ranging interests. His creations transport the viewer into private universes, populated with objects and ephemera imbued with personal associations.
From a basement in New York, Joseph Cornell channelled his limitless imagination into some of the most original art of the 20th century. Step into his beguiling world at this landmark exhibition. Cornell hardly ventured beyond New York State, yet the notion of travel was central to his art. His imaginary voyages began as he searched Manhattan’s antique bookshops and dime stores, collecting a vast archive of paper ephemera and small objects to make his signature glass-fronted ‘shadow boxes’. These miniature masterpieces transform everyday objects into spellbinding treasures. Together they reveal his fascination with subjects from astronomy and cinema to literature and ornithology and especially his love of European culture, from the Romantic ballet to Renaissance Italy.
Wanderlust brings together 80 of Cornell’s most remarkable boxes, assemblages, collages and films, some never before seen outside the USA. Entirely self-taught, the independence of Cornell’s creative voice won the admiration of artists from Marcel Duchamp and the Surrealists, to Robert Motherwell and the Abstract Expressionists, with echoes of his work felt in Pop and Minimalist art. Wanderlust is a long overdue celebration of an incomparable artist, a man the New York Times called “a poet of light; an architect of memory-fractured rooms and a connoisseur of stars, celestial and otherwise.”
Early Life
Joseph Cornell was the eldest of four children – he had two sisters, Elizabeth and Helen, and a brother, Robert, who suffered from cerebral palsy and was confined to a wheelchair for most of his life. When Cornell was thirteen, his father died of leukaemia and Robert became Joseph’s responsibility (partly to assuage their overbearing mother). Robert however was a cheerful child and took pleasure in drawing and collecting model trains. Cornell considered Robert to be a pure soul, and willingly took on his brother’s care. A salesman and textile designer, Cornell’s father had left considerable debts for his family to manage and for several years Cornell’s mother was forced to take odd jobs to support the family, and move them into a succession of smaller rented houses. In 1917, with the help of his father’s former employer, Joseph was able to enrol at the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts: a highly regarded private school. There he discovered an interest in American and European literature, poetry, history and French. Yet, away from his close knit family and after the relatively recent death of his father, Cornell struggled and was a mediocre student. He developed the first in a lifelong series of nervous crises and stomach problems, and left the Academy in 1921 without graduating.
Upon his return home, Cornell assumed the role of ‘man of the house’ and became a sample salesman in his father’s trade for a wholesale textile business, the William Whitman Company on lower Madison Avenue. Cornell found the job mundane and himself unsuited to its demands. In his twenties, a time when the stress of supporting his family was exacerbating his stomach ailments, he converted to Christian Science. This religion teaches that reality is purely spiritual and the material world an illusion, so disease and other afflictions associated with the physical body are thought to be manifestations of a troubled mind that ought to be treated with prayer, not medicine. Joseph remained an active member until his death and recruited his brother Robert and sister Elizabeth into the fold.
In 1929, Mrs Cornell moved the family to an unassuming house at 3708 Utopia Parkway in Flushing, Queens, New York. Here, Cornell would live with his mother and brother until he died. His main escape from the tedium of domestic life and the awkward social interactions thrust upon him at work was to walk the city streets in his lunch hour, browsing the second-hand bookshops on Fourth Avenue, the flea markets and dime stores, collecting keepsakes and scavenging for relics and once-precious fragments of other people’s lives. Cornell loved to explore Manhattan and the ‘teeming life of the metropolis’, which seemed to him the epitome of glamour. These wanderings led to Cornell amassing a vast personal archive of treasured finds – books, prints, postcards and three-dimensional ephemera such as clay pipes and watch springs – often tinged with the romance of foreign places and the nostalgia of times past, which would in due course form the material elements of the very personal poetry that is his art.
Play and Experiment
Although he did not complete his formal education, Cornell was extremely well read and kept abreast of Manhattan’s literary, musical and artistic events. Not only did he regularly attend the theatre and the ballet, but he also became an avid cinema-goer, thriving on the excitement of the city. Indeed, Cornell often waited at the stage door of theatres and opera houses for a glimpse of the female performers he idolised. He also spent time in art galleries, and in 1931 at the Julien Levy Gallery he came across collages by Max Ernst (1891-1976), a pioneer of Surrealism, who combined high art and popular imagery in his work.
Although Cornell was never officially part of the Surrealist movement and came to dismiss Surrealist associations with his own practice, it had a major influence on him, most notably inspiring his embrace of unexpected juxtapositions in his assemblages and his experimental films, like Rose Hobart (1936). Rejecting Surrealism’s more violent and erotic aspects – the shock effect of jarring images – Cornell preferred instead what he described as the ‘white magic’ side of Surrealism, and the poetic connections between everyday objects.
By 1931 Cornell had shifted from simply collecting objects to creating them. He began to make collages and assemblages first in a style resembling Max Ernst’s, then in his own manner. The basis of collage – piecing together and assembling – would be central to Cornell’s works throughout his life, be they two- or three-dimensional. At this early stage he took images from the dense dossiers of engravings and clippings that he had accumulated by this time, fashioning compositions from seemingly unrelated cutout images to create whimsical pairings, which often revealed his dual interests in science and the world of children. Both these themes would recur and overlap throughout his career…
After viewing a number of Cornell’s small surreal collages, such as Untitled (Schooner), 1931, Julien Levy invited him to show in his exhibition, Surréalisme, which opened in January 1932. Later, Levy offered Cornell a solo show, the first of several that were held at his gallery. Entitled Objects by Joseph Cornell: Minutiae, Glass Bells, Shadow Boxes, Coups d’Oeil, Jouets Surréalistes, it included a series of collages and small three-dimensional objects such as bell jars and pillboxes. All the works were made at his kitchen table at night as his mother and brother slept.
Uneasy about his work being associated with Surrealism, Cornell later wrote to Alfred H. Barr, founding director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and organiser of the 1936 exhibition, Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, in which Cornell’s work was to feature: “In the event that you are saying a word or two about my work in the catalogue, I would appreciate your saying that I do not share in the subconscious and dream theories of the Surrealists. While fervently admiring much of their work I have never been an official Surrealist, and I believe that Surrealism has healthier possibilities than have been developed.” Regardless of Cornell’s own attempt to distance himself from the movement, Surrealism provided him, at least, with a context in which he could make his collages and objets, and understand them as deserving of a mature and discerning audience.
Around this time, Cornell encountered the collages and box constructions of Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948), composed of urban detritus, and the ‘readymades’ of Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), which are ordinary, unaltered manufactured objects designated by the artist to be works of art. In Duchamp, Cornell discovered an unlikely friend; the two regularly corresponded throughout their lifetime. When Duchamp visited New York in the 1940s, he enlisted Cornell to help him with a new project, a miniature ‘museum’ of his work, known as the Boîte-en-valise or ‘box in a suitcase’. Cornell already had his own ‘valise’ experiment, Untitled (The Crystal Cage: Portrait of Berenice).
Collecting and Classification
In the 1930s, Cornell began to make the ‘shadow boxes’ for which he is best known – glass-fronted box constructions containing intimately-scaled arrangements of found objects and paper ephemera, assembled in a sort of three-dimensional collage. The 1936 exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism at MoMA, New York, showed one of his first shadow boxes, Untitled (Soap Bubble Set) (above). This was the first in a long series of the same name and recalls the children’s pastime of blowing bubbles, as well as the eighteenth-century European painting association of bubbles as memento mori, a reminder of the transience of life. Precisely what led Cornell to the idea of the box remains unclear. In a Life magazine article from 1967 he said that it came to him during one of his walks through Manhattan, as he passed a collection of compasses in the window of an antique shop:
“I thought, everything can be used in a lifetime, can’t it, and went on walking. I’d scarcely gone two blocks when I came on another shop window full of boxes, all different kinds […] Halfway home on the train that night, I thought of the compasses and boxes, it occurred to me to put the two together.”
Before Cornell developed his own carpentry skills, his early shadow boxes were housed in prefabricated, semi-antique wooden boxes, popular during the Victorian era for displaying small paintings, ship models, ladies’ handiwork and mementoes. In the nineteenth century, a similar tradition existed in China, where hardwood boxes with sliding glass covers and papered or silk-lined interiors were used to display fine ceramics, especially figurines made for export. Cornell’s approach also recalls European traditions that began to appear in his research dossiers during the 1930s: small seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Dutch and Flemish kunstschranke or kunstkammer – cabinets that housed separate elements assembled to represent the world in miniature. In the mid 1930s, Cornell’s neighbour Carl Backman taught him some basic carpentry skills, which allowed him to construct his own boxes. The boxes are often hard to date accurately, as Cornell would tinker with and refine his constructions over several years, returning to them gradually. However, except for his early boxes which tend to be singular, we can see patterns emerging in his practice as he worked on larger ‘families’ of works that share discernible visual motifs, often unfolding over a decade or more. These series include: ‘Hotels’, ‘Pharmacies’, ‘Aviaries’, ‘Dovecotes’, ‘Observatories’ and ‘Night Skies’.
The ‘Pharmacy’ assemblages, with their compartmentalised structures and associations with collection and classification – a nod to the ordered world of museum display – are a good illustration of one of Cornell’s ‘families’. Here, in this early example of a series that stretched over a decade with at least six similar works, we see a small specimen case containing four ordered rows of five glass jars. Its title appears to refer to medicine and healing, yet as a practising Christian Scientist, Cornell was forbidden to take medicine. Instead, in this miniature apothecary, he has created tonics for the soul and the imagination, with each fragile jar containing an object or substance that has poetic connotations – shells and sand for travel, feathers, delicate butterfly wings, tiny snippets of parchment. The interior is lined with mirrors, creating echoing reflections of the jars that line the shelves. Though its contents may seem trivial, each jar is imbued with significance, its humble items elevated and made precious through the language of their display. Looking into this box, we see a world of associations, nostalgia and elusive meaning.
By the time Cornell created Pharmacy, he had stopped working, and was pursuing his art full time. From this point on, Cornell regularly exhibited and sold his artwork. He also did freelance design work and picture research for magazines such as Vogue and House & Garden. He set up a workshop and storage area in the basement of the house on Utopia Parkway. Working in his new studio, which he sometimes referred to as his ‘laboratory’, Cornell was able to conceive works with more complex craftsmanship than he had been able to do when working at the kitchen table. While most days were spent at home, he would still escape into New York in search of inspiration and to visit friends. A keen diarist, he would sit in Manhattan coffee shops, indulging his notorious sweet tooth with sugary snacks while furiously scribbling notes on scraps of paper that would later be typed up into more formal diary entries.
As well as being an avid people-watcher, Cornell enjoyed ornithology and expressed his love of birds in the ‘Aviary’ and ‘Habitat’ series, which speak of their exoticism and beauty. Birds often symbolise freedom, their flight paths linking the heavens and the earth. In myths and religion, small birds in particular have been used to represent the souls of children freed from their earthly bonds.
While visually distinct from the ‘Pharmacy’ series, Habitat Group for a Shooting Gallery (above) continues the theme of arrangement and classification in Cornell’s work, with the cut-out illustrations of macaws, a parrot and a cockatoo mounted like museum specimens or dioramas against a bright white background. However, this dynamic construction has an uncharacteristic aura of violence, and contrasts with other pieces where the box is seen as a safe environment in which objects could be placed, secure and cherished. In this case, the glass that protects the sanctuary of the box has been cracked, its contents exposed to external elements. The central ‘bullet hole’ directly in front of the cockatoo’s crown acts as a focal point for the assemblage, guiding our eye in and then out to the four corners of the box. Bold splashes of colour convey a sense of theatricality and drama (Cornell referred to some of his boxes as ‘poetic theatres’), and the game counters placed over each bird evoke the targets of shooting galleries in penny arcades. Scattered feathers at the bottom of the construction, the shot glass and splotches of paint all suggest a violent event. In a rare moment of political commentary in Cornell’s work, this habitat serves as a metaphor for the horrors of the Second World War, with the birds embodying the innocence of victims caught up in the destruction of war.
Observation and Exploration
One of the great paradoxes in Cornell’s life was the gulf between the multitudinous references in his work to distant times and foreign places, and the fact that he himself never physically left the USA. He was a devotee of nineteenth century European culture and a collector of Baedeker Guides (to travel, published in the 1830s), timetables and travel literature, yet he never went abroad – not because he didn’t have the means to do so but because, as one commentator noted, he ‘preferred the ticket to the trip’, which makes his evocation of a traveller’s sense of wanderlust even more remarkable. Cornell let dreams of voyages, particularly to Europe, remain imagined and thus unrealised, preserving his reveries in the same fashion as his glass-fronted boxes. Recurring often in his work are poignant emblems of transience and travel – birds, celestial maps, exotic-sounding hotels and luggage tags – but they remain frozen in their boxed confinement. Thus, fittingly, the central paradox in Cornell’s life found expression in the very medium for which he is now best known.
“Original inspiration of the bird store, windows, simplicity of magic, pet shop.”
Joseph Cornell, c. 1943, Joseph Cornell Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC
Cornell also dreamed of celestial navigation and was fascinated by the night sky and planets. In Soap Bubble Set (1948, below), Cornell arranged fragments collected during his Manhattan wanderings against the backdrop of an antique lunar map, the roundness of the moon alluding to the titular spherical soap bubble. In his shadow boxes, soap bubbles came to symbolise the relationship between science and childhood imagination, knowledge and wonder, as well as serving as an allegory of vanitas and the ephemerality of life. White Dutch clay pipes, the signature motif of the ‘Soap Bubble’ series, are positioned symmetrically in side compartments, laid out like scientific instruments in a lab, gleaming against the dark velvet interior of the case. These pipes, used as toys for blowing bubbles, suggest the element air, while at a lower level a fragment of driftwood (probably scavenged by Cornell while beach combing on Long Island) grounds us in the natural world and hints at the weathering effects of wind and water over time. A cordial glass stands alone, delicate and vulnerable, empty in this construction but in others from this series cradling a marble, perhaps as a metaphor for forces securing the planets in place. At the top of the construction, the artist has hung a row of seven cylinders, the number possibly invoking the Copernican model of the solar system (in which seven planets orbit the Sun). The overall impression is of a poetic understanding of science, the infinity of space made bearable by the inclusion of objects whose culturally recognisable associations position us, along with Cornell, on Earth.
Ironically, Cornell’s first recorded response to the cosmos was fear. According to his sister Elizabeth, after having returned from school for the Christmas holidays, he woke her one night, ‘shaking like a leaf’, and stood at the window while confessing his anxiety about the concept of infinity. His concern translated to intrigue later in life and his shadow boxes abound with references to astronomy and space exploration. Cornell kept up to date with the latest scientific discoveries and was a keen stargazer, regularly observing the night sky from his backyard, or his kitchen window, sometimes referred to as his ‘observatory’.
In 1949, Cornell joined the Egan Gallery in New York, run by Charles Egan. Around this time we can see a fresh approach emerging in his work, as he branched away from the more theatrical Victorian constructs of his early career, which can appear comparatively dense. This may have been a reaction to Abstract Expressionism, a new movement developed by American painters such as Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) and Robert Motherwell (1915-1991) who used abstraction and gesture to convey expressive content. The Egan Gallery’s roster of artists included notable Abstract Expressionists such as Willem de Kooning (1904-1997) and Franz Kline (1910-1962).
Cornell continued to explore themes of astronomy and celestial navigation in the ‘Observatory’, ‘Night Skies’, and ‘Hotel’ series (the latter also playing with the notion of a hotel as a microcosm of the wider world and, for Cornell, the universe). This work, Andromeda: Grand Hôtel de l’Observatoire (1954, above), combines many of the motifs prevalent in these series, yet is noticeably pared back. The deep, contemplative blue of the composition suggests a starry night sky, and the cracked, aged, white frame evokes the faded grandeur of forgotten European hotels, built for wealthy travellers between the 1880s and 1920s but now fallen into disrepair. Cornell scrapbooked the names of the hotels in this series from adverts in turn-of-the-century guidebooks to European cities.
Despite the smallness of the box, Cornell has created a sense of space within by foregrounding a delicate silver chain and white dowel against the rich starry expanse beyond. The female figure we see in the background is Andromeda, a character in Greek mythology who was chained to a rock as a sacrificial offering to a sea monster because her mother, Cassiopeia, had angered the sea god Poseidon and the Nereids by boasting of her and her daughter’s beauty. Andromeda was rescued from her plight by the hero Perseus, who then married her. Upon her death, she was placed in the skies as a constellation alongside her husband and her mother. Like her rescuer, Cornell has liberated Andromeda from the chains that bound her to the Earth. She is not attached to the silver chain, which both recalls the myth and suggests a ladder to the heavens. With the lightest touch, Cornell has skilfully created both the physical presence of a beautiful woman, and her heavenly equivalent as a constellation in the night sky.
As well as seeking inspiration across galaxies and the limitless expanses of space, Cornell would also delve into myth and history, both factual and personal, to seek out the characters who reside in his shadow boxes. In one of his most famous series, the ‘Medici Slot Machines’, Cornell superimposed memories of his own happy childhood (before his father’s death) onto reproductions of portraits of Medici princes and princesses by the Renaissance artists Sofonisba Anguissola (1532-1625), Bronzino (1503-1572) and Pinturicchio (1454-1513). By mixing his personal history (Cornell recalled with fondness the outings to penny arcades and shooting galleries of his youth) with these Florentine children, and further juxtaposing Old Master paintings with symbols of popular amusement, he created a mysterious world that contrasts high and low culture with haunting beauty.
This elegiac composition centres around Bronzino’s posthumous portrait of Bia de’ Medici. Bia, the illegitimate but beloved daughter of Cosimo I de’ Medici, died from a fever aged 6, and Bronzino used her death mask as a model. Around her neck, she wears a medallion with her father’s profile on it. Cornell has effectively enshrined Bia in this box, simultaneously surrounded by the trappings of childhood (marbles, jacks, toy blocks), and, notably, the metal spirals of watch springs in the upper corners, which act as a metaphor for time cycles and life repeating itself. A bright red ball in front of the young girl attracts the viewer, as do the sightlines, mimicking the cross-hair targets of amusement park shooting galleries, which converge over one eye. Bia is flanked by columns, decorated with Baedeker maps of Italy, and further side compartments stacked with repeated images, like the spliced frames of a film, recalling Eadweard Muybridge’s (1830-1904) early sequences of animal and human movement, as well as foreshadowing Pop artist Andy Warhol’s (1928-1987) multiple silkscreen homages to celebrities like Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe. There is a concealed drawer at the base of the box, containing a bundle of letters tied with thread, and a paper fan, perhaps a nod to the attributes of the courtly life of a princess. Cornell’s creations often included kinetic elements like marbles or toy balls, although they are seldom activated now, as the assemblages are too delicate. In this box, the unfixed objects placed around Bia accentuate her stillness and steady gaze. Perhaps because of the blue staining of the glass, we become more aware of the wall that separates us from this young girl, frozen in a world that we can look in upon, but not enter. She looks out at us directly, but is she imprisoned or merely on display?
“Peering into glass panelled boxes to inspect their contents is not unlike looking through a telescope in order to bring the distant closer. Windows, doors, compartments, drawers, cross-hair targets – all of these elements grant access or focus as we navigate the world Cornell has framed.”
Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, Joseph Cornell: Shadowplay Eterniday, 2003
That he visited the opera and the ballet in New York is not surprising, as his miniature dioramas also recall stage sets with a scenic and narrative quality. As Mary Ann Caws writes in Joseph Cornell’s Theatre of the Mind, “Cornell’s shadow boxes invite us to peek, to peep, and finally to yield to our imagination… We meet in the confines of this tiny frame, this microcosm of complicity.” The boxes are filled with potential energy, as if just about to move, and are spaces in which multiple scales co-exist: time and history, the natural world and the cosmos. They are places of curious juxtaposition: take Untitled (Celestial Navigation) (1956-1958, above), in which the universe is depicted through everyday objects.
Longing and Reverie
For Cornell, a relationship with a woman (other than his mother) seemed unattainable. He never married, and for him the female figure took on an elevated accumulation of hope and desire of almost mythic proportions. Throughout his life he developed obsessions with opera singers, waitresses, film stars, shop girls and most vividly, ballerinas (alive or dead). In the 1930s he discovered the international revival of the Romantic ballet, and spent the next 30 years exploring his fascination with the ‘queens of the dance’. His favourites included Romanticera prima ballerinas Marie Taglioni (1804-1884) and Fanny Cerrito (1817-1909), and their modern counterparts Tamara Toumanova (1919-1996) and Allegra Kent (b. 1937). He also became good friends with Pavel Tchelitchew (1898-1957), the Russian Surrealist painter and set and costume designer who, as a well-known figure on the international dance scene, introduced Cornell to dancers and other balletomanes.
This box (Naples, 1942, below) is a tender homage to Fanny Cerrito, a nineteenth-century ballerina who captivated Cornell (he first came across her likeness in a bookstore on Fourth Avenue, on a souvenir lithograph from 1842). Cerrito was best known for her 1843 performance in Ondine, a ballet based on a fairy tale about a knight who falls in love with an ethereal water sprite. For her first entrance on stage, Cerrito posed in a giant cockleshell, rising up on a platform through the stage. In this assemblage, Cornell celebrates her birthplace of Naples, illustrating its famously narrow streets festooned with lines of laundry. The luggage label and the handle of the box, which recall a suitcase, give a sense of travel and distance, but the seashells propped up in the corners of the box and the faded sea-green paint that borders the scene speak to Cerrito’s most famous role.
Another example of Cornell’s devotional works is this stunningly austere piece entitled Toward the Blue Peninsula: for Emily Dickinson (1953, below). The purity of this box and the inclusion of a grid-like structure recall the signature style of Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), a Minimalist artist who radically simplified the elements of painting to reflect the underlying spiritual order of the visible world that he believed in. Cornell admired Mondrian’s work and mentioned him in his 1946 diary: ‘Mondrian feeling strong. Feeling of progress and satisfaction.’
As the title suggests, this shadow box was created for the nineteenth-century American poet Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), with whom Cornell felt a deep affinity. Like Cornell, Dickinson lived with her family, never travelled far from home or married, and translated her intense longing into her art. A withdrawn and enigmatic woman, she rarely left the upstairs bedroom in her home in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she wrote her poems. Dickinson’s bedroom inspired the setting for this simple, white-washed box that resembles an abandoned aviary. At first, almost everything about this box suggests containment – the white mesh cage, the dowel perch and bird feeder – but we find no resident here. In fact, the mesh has been cut open and to the left we see a rectangle of clear, refreshing blue suggesting a window open to the sky – the infinite beyond into which our bird has flown. Emily Dickinson sometimes referred to herself as a ‘little wren’ and often, like Cornell, included birds in her work. Here, Cornell ensures that she has been set free, present only in spirit, with two small scraps of printed paper at the bottom of the case the only physical reminder of her presence. The empty box is silent, a vacuum left after the action has occurred. The title of this work comes from a poem by Dickinson that begins: ‘It might be lonelier / Without the Loneliness / I’m so accustomed to my Fate.’ It ends:
It might be easier To fail – with Land in Sight – Than gain – My Blue Peninsula – To perish – of Delight –
Here, Dickinson is asking whether longing is better than having, a question that clearly spoke to Cornell and his own deep-seated yearning. Better that dream remain imagined but unrealised, the poet advises, lest it disappoint. It seems these are words that Cornell heeded his entire life.
In the early 1960s, Cornell did finally break with tradition and became attached to a young woman, a New York waitress named Joyce Hunter. This was Cornell’s first real-life romance and he was dazzled by her, making her several gifts of his boxes and collages. Joyce eventually stole artworks from his home (though he refused to prosecute her), and was later murdered by an acquaintance in an unrelated incident in December 1964. Her death devastated Cornell, and marks the beginning of his decline into isolation; his brother Robert died in 1965, his mother a year later. In the winter of 1965 he began a series of collages dedicated to Robert’s memory…
Now alone in his family home, Cornell still received visitors (an invitation to Utopia Parkway had become something of an art-world trophy) but conditions in the house declined as his involvement in Christian Science and the metaphysical world increased. He would write letters to the ghosts of his former life – Robert, his mother, Joyce Hunter. Cornell became more and more interested in sharing his work with a younger audience and one of his last exhibitions in 1972 was expressly for children: A Joseph Cornell Exhibition for Children at the Cooper Union School of Art and Architecture, where cake and soda pops were served instead of the traditional champagne and canapés. He often said children were his most enthusiastic and receptive audience, and lent boxes to children in his neighbourhood for their enjoyment. Cornell continued to work until the end of his life, although he stopped making new boxes sometime in the 1960s, after which he focused on ‘refurbishing’ earlier boxes by breaking them down and reconstituting them. His main focus was a renewed interest in creating collages, which he saw as freer and more spontaneous than box construction. He also concentrated on making films and re-editing earlier cinematic work. Following prostate surgery in June 1972, he spent several months recuperating with family in Westhampton before returning to Utopia Parkway in November. Cornell died of heart failure alone at home, just a few days after his sixty-ninth birthday.
Conclusion
What can we make of the life of Joseph Cornell? From his shadow boxes we get the impression of a man who preferred fantasy to reality, finding inspiration and affinity with long-dead characters from history, from Renaissance princesses to Romantic ballerinas. But Cornell was also conscious of and responded to the changing landscape of twentieth-century art – Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art and Minimalism – and had a tremendous influence on other artists during his lifetime. He had an appetite for subjects that were as far ranging as his imagination, and was able to express, with the deftest of touches, huge concepts within intimate, self-contained spaces. Cornell’s cloistered worlds seem to encompass the entire universe in microcosm – its infinity, wonder, mystery and power all contained within a small box. Their appeal can only be accentuated by the fact that their creator conjured these worlds purely from imagination rather than experience. His last reported words to his sister Elizabeth on the day he died were, “You know, I was thinking, I wish I hadn’t been so reserved.” While this restraint may have caused him regret in his daily life, we see little trace of it in his art, which seems instead to be a magical, generous invitation to the viewer as a gateway to reverie, and to dream.
Joseph Cornell: Wanderlust offers an overview of the American artist’s inventive oeuvre, surveying around 80 of his remarkable box constructions, assemblages, collages and films. The last major solo exhibition of Cornell in Europe took place nearly 35 years ago, originating at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1980, and travelling to the Whitechapel Gallery in the UK. With very few works on permanent display in European museums, the exhibition is an opportunity to see rarely lent masterpieces from public and private collections in the United States, Europe and Japan.
Cornell (1903-1972) never left America and hardly ventured beyond New York City, yet through his art he set out to travel through history, the continents of the globe and even the spiritual realm. His works are manifestations of a powerful ‘wanderlust’ of the mind and soul.
Collecting was central to Cornell’s creativity; he amassed a vast and eclectic personal archive of paper ephemera and found objects, eventually numbering tens of thousands of items. This material revealed his wide-ranging interests from opera, ballet, cinema and theatre to history, ornithology, poetry and astronomy. Europe held a special place in Cornell’s imagination, and many of the works selected for this exhibition highlight his love of its historic cultures, from the Belle Époque to the Italian Renaissance. Inspired by these interests, he incorporated his collected materials inside glass-fronted wooden box constructions creating miniature worlds known as his ‘shadow boxes’, as well as producing collages and film.
Cornell was entirely self-taught and has often been characterised as an outsider to the New York art scene. In reality, he was highly engaged with the art movements and artists of the time, exhibiting regularly alongside the Surrealists and Abstract Expressionists, whilst carefully maintaining his independence from any one group. He counted many vanguard artists among his friends including Marcel Duchamp, Robert Motherwell, and Dorothea Tanning.
The exhibition is arranged thematically in four sections that reflect the artistic processes expressed in Cornell’s diaries and notes; Play and Experiment, Collecting and Classification, Observation and Exploration and Longing and Reverie. The selection brings together key works from his major series: Museums, Aviaries, Soap Bubble Sets, Palaces, Medici Slot Machines, Hotels and Dovecotes.
Press release from the Royal Academy of Arts website
“Impressions intriguingly diverse – that, in order to hold fast, one might assemble, assort, and arrange into a cabinet – the contraption kind of the amusement resorts with endless ingenuity of effect, worked by coin and plunger, or brightly coloured pin-balls – travelling inclined runways – starting in motion compartment after compartment with a symphony of mechanical magic of sight and sound borrowed from the motion picture art – into childhood – into fantasy – through the streets of New York – through tropical skies – etc. – into the receiving trays the balls come to rest releasing prizes.”
Joseph Cornell
Royal Academy of Arts Piccadilly site Burlington House, Piccadilly London W1J 0BD Burlington Gardens site 6 Burlington Gardens London W1S 3ET
Exhibition dates: 24th July – 27th September, 2015
Curator: Wendy Garden
Hotham Street Ladies (est. Australia 2007) Dark tea (installation view) 2015 Royal icing, butter cream icing, fondant, food dye, found objects Dimensions variable Courtesy of the artists Photo: Marcus Bunyan
This is the best thematic group exhibition I have seen in Melbourne and surrounds this year.
Every piece in the exhibition is visually stimulating and intelligently constructed, all works combining to make an engaging exhibition. Nothing is superfluous, every work having something interesting to say, whether it is about the ceremony of tea drinking, colonisation, global warming, Stolen Generations or social mores. Congratulations must go to the curators and artists for their efforts.
Particular favourites where the Hotham Street Ladies Dark Tea (2015, below) made of royal icing, butter cream icing, fondant, food dye, and found objects; the many sculptural objects which form the backbone of the exhibition, especially the work of Sharon West and Penny Byrne; and the wonderful vintage photographs that are displayed in the foyer of the gallery.
Accompanying this exhibition is another excellent exhibition, Ways to draw: A selection from the permanent collection by Betty Churcher, on till 27th September as well. If you want a day out from Melbourne with lunch in Mornington, some seriously good art and a drive along the coast, you could do no better than visit the gallery in the next week. Highly recommended.
Hotham Street Ladies (est. Australia 2007) Dark tea (installation view details) 2015 Royal icing, butter cream icing, fondant, food dye, found objects Dimensions variable Courtesy of the artists Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Charles Blackman (Australian, 1928-2018) Feet beneath the table 1956 Tempera and oil on composition board 106.5 x 121.8cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Presented through the NGV Foundation by Barbara Blackman, Honorary Life Benefactor, 2005
Charles Blackman first encountered Lewis Caroll’s book, Alice in Wonderland, through a talking book for the blind which his wife, Barbara was listening to. Her developing blindness resulted in telescopic vision, spatial disorientation and a shrinking visual field. She was also pregnant with their first child and her distorted body image also had parallels with Alice’s experiences. By painting Alice at the Mad Hatter’s tea party Blackman could express his wife’s feeling of bewilderment and disorientation.
E. Phillips Fox (Australian, 1865-1915) The arbour 1910 Oil on canvas 190.5 x 230.7cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Felton Bequest 1916
Melbourne born E. Phillips Fox, described as ‘one of the greatest of Australia’s Impressionist painters and the most gifted of her colourists’1 went to Paris in 1887 to study at the Ecole des Beaux Arts where he encountered the work of the French Impressionists. He remained in Paris for several years but made frequent trips back to Melbourne to visit his family. The Arbour was painted in Paris in Fox’s garden but is based upon observations of family life in his brother’s garden in Malvern. The depiction of an elegant family taking tea al fresco is a study of refined gentility. The Arbour was exhibited at both the Royal Academy and the Paris Salon exhibitions and was regarded by Fox as the finest thing he had done.2 At the time the painting was much admired for its ‘subtle lights ad shadow’3 and his exemplary ‘use of delicate colour and refined harmonies.’4
1/ Courier Mail, 12 May 1949 2/ Sydney Morning Herald, 13 October 1913 3/ Sydney Morning Herald, 13 October 1913 4/ Le Courrier Australien, Sydney, 15 April 1949
Clare Humphries (Australian, b. 1973) Some things were out in the open 2007 Pigment print on Hahnemühle photo rag paper (ed. 3/5) 63 x 62cm Courtesy of the artist
Adam Hill (Blak Douglas) (Australian, b. 1970) Not everyone’s cup of tea 2009 Synthetic polymer paint on canvas 150 x 260cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 2009
Kendal Murray (Australian, b. 1958) Exceed speed, mislead, concede 2011 Mixed media assemblage 18 x 24 x 14cm Courtesy of the artist and Arthouse Gallery, Sydney
Penny Byrne (Australian, b. 1965) Tea for two in Tuvalu 2011 Vintage porcelain figurine, vintage, Action man accessories, vintage coral, glass fish, epoxy resin, epoxy putty, retouching medium, powder pigments 15 x 19cm Private Collection
Penny Byrne (Australian, b. 1965) Tea for two in Tuvalu (installation view) 2011 Vintage porcelain figurine, vintage, Action man accessories, vintage coral, glass fish, epoxy resin, epoxy putty, retouching medium, powder pigments 15 x 19cm Private Collection Photo: Marcus Bunyan
This piece was inspired by an underwater cabinet meeting held in 2009 by Maldives President Mohammed Nasheed in a campaign to raise awareness for activity on climate change. The thirty minute meeting was held six metres below sea level and was attended by eleven cabinet members calling upon all countries to cut their emissions to halt further temperature rises.
Polynesian island nation of Tuvalu, located in the Pacific Ocean midway between Hawaii and Australia, experienced a severe drought in 2011. A state of emergency was declared and rationing of fresh-water took place which restricted households on some of the islands to two buckets of fresh water per day. Tuvalu is also especially susceptible to changes in sea level and it is estimated that a sea level rise of 20 to 40 centimetres in the next 100 years could make Tuvalu uninhabitable.
Kate Bergin (Australian, b. 1968) The hunt for a room of one’s own 2012 Oil on canvas on board 75 x 101cm Private Collection
Kate Bergin draws upon Dutch and Flemish seventeenth century tradition of still life painting to comment on our attitudes to animals. Bergin stages the scene on a crumpled white tablecloth upon which a large fox, based on a taxidermy fox she bought on eBay, regally sits centre stage. Meticulously rendered native birds, including a honeyeater, finch and triller, are based on photographs of specimens from the Melbourne Museum Collection. They flit about unperturbed by the introduced predator. Teaspoons, representing the impulse for collecting, entangle the fox and bird. Together with a teapot and cup, precariously placed, they contribute to the overarching sense of impending chaos.
Both afternoon tea and the fox represent English upper class social mores and were introduced into the colonies following British settlement. The fox arrived in 1855, brought in for recreational hunting, and has been a major cause of native bird extinctions. Fox numbers are increasing in some areas further threatening the precarious balance between wild life and introduced species.
Sharon West (Australian, b. 1963) Two Koori Tribesmen receive a gift of afternoon tea from local colonists (installation photo) 2014 Mixed media assemblage 15 x 46 x 30cm Courtesy of the artist Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Heather Shimmen (Australian, b. 1957) Tip me up (installation view) 2005 Linocut on paper and organza (ed. 7/30) 56 x 76cm Courtesy of the artist and Australian Galleries, Melbourne and Sydney Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Trent Jansen (Australian, b. 1981) Briggs family tea service (installation view) 2011 Slip cast porcelain, bull kelp, wallaby pelt, copper and brass George (teapot) 22.5 x 20.5 x 13cm; Woretermoeteyenner (sugar bowl) 16 x 13.5 x 9cm; Dolly (milk jug) 12.5 x 12.5 x 8.5cm; John (teacup) 7 x 8.5 x 8cm; Eliza (teacup) 7.5 x 10.5 x 8cm; Mary (teacup) 10 x 9 x 6.5cm Courtesy of Broached Commissions, Melbourne Photo: Marcus Bunyan
The Briggs family tea service represents the marriage of George Briggs, a free settler, to Woretermoeteyenner of the Pairrebeenne people in Van Diemen’s Land and the four children they had together. Briggs arrived from Bedfordshire in 1791 and learned to speak the language of the local Pairrebeenne people, trading tea, flour and sugar fro kangaroo, wallaby and seal skins. It is understood that he became good friends with the leader of the Pairrebeenne people, Mannalargenna, and by 1810 he partnered his daughter Woretermoeteyenner. Their marriage meant she had to adapt to a way of life that merged her traditional cultural values with the ways of British settlers. The teapot and sugar bowl represent the parents while their first daughter, Doll Mountgarret Briggs is symbolised in the milk jug and the three cups each signify their other children John, Eliza and Mary.
The tea service is a hybrid design bringing together materials common to both cultures. To realise the set Jansen worked with Rod Bamford on the ceramic elements, Oliver Smith for the brass and copper and Vicki West, who uses the traditional methods of her Tasmanian Aboriginal ancestors, worked with the bull kelp components.
eX de Medici (Australian, b. 1959) Blue (Bower-Bauer) (installation view) 1998-2000 Watercolour over black pencil on paper 114.0 x 152.8cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 2004 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
eX de Medici (Australian, b. 1959) Blue (Bower-Bauer) (installation view detail) 1998-2000 Watercolour over black pencil on paper 114.0 x 152.8cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 2004 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
A turning point in eX de Medici’s career came in 1998 when she saw an exhibition of watercolours by Ferdinand Bauer comprising 2,000 rarely seen images of native flora and fauna made when Bauer was official artist on Matthew Flinder’s historic circumnavigation of Australia in 1801-1803. Previously working with tattoo imagery, Medici found the intricate works so compelling she decided to change course and ‘retrograde’ herself and explore watercolour as a medium.1
Referencing Australia’s Bower bird that adorns its nest with anything blue, Medici entangles the history of vanitas painting with commentary about the desire to seek permanence and affirmation in the accumulation of things. The broken willow pattern platter, upturned jugs and cups, amassed with so many other decorative and functional objects, are juxtaposed with skulls, fruit and flowers – symbols of mortality. A reaction to what she considered John Howard’s regressive politics at the time, the work ‘is a kind of a backhanded discussion about colonising our minds with retroactive ideas’.2
1/ Ted Gott. ‘eX deMedici an epic journey on a Lilliputian scale’ Art and Australia Vol. 40, No. 1, Spring 2002, p. 105 2/ eX deMedici in Paul Flynn. Artist Profile #5, March 2008, pp. 28-35.
Storm in a Teacup reflects upon tea drinking in Australia. Introduced by the British colonials, the afternoon tea party was an attempt to ‘civilise’ the land. Tea drinking became so popular in the colonies that by 1888 the amount of tea consumed per capita exceeded the amount consumed in England. Soon after, billy tea was to become an enduring symbol of the pioneering spirit, immortalised by Henry Lawson’s stories published under the title While the billy boils.
Beginning with elegant paintings of the afternoon tea table from E. Phillips Fox and Arthur Streeton, the exhibition goes on to explore the darker side of tea drinking and the social and environmental impacts of the humble cup of tea. Michael Cook’s Object (table), 2015, provides an alternative history to the narrative of colonialism while Sharon West and Adam Hill both use humour to subvert colonial understandings of the afternoon tea party as an occasion of refined gentility.
The humble cuppa has been around for thousands of years, but this exhibition explores how a popular beverage can impact on us culturally, socially, environmentally and politically. There is more to debate than just the proper way to make a cup of tea. Storm in a teacup explores far-reaching issues brewing from tea, including the imposition of one culture upon another – especially on the colonial frontier; the production of ceramics and the environmental impacts of porcelain and its production; gender stereotypes and socialisation through tea parties. The exhibition also reflects upon tea drinking ceremonies in Asia within a western Orientalist paradigm and tea drinking as an occasion for familial cohesiveness and disconnect.
Text from the Mornington Peninsula Regional Art Gallery
Mark James Daniel (Australian, 1867-1949) Verandah, “Harefield” – afternoon tea Feb 1900 Glass negative 8.5 x 11cm (quarter plate) Collection of the State Library of Victoria
Michael J Drew (Australian, 1873-1943) Group taking tea in a garden between 1890 and 1900 Glass negative 12.2 x 16.5cm (half plate) Collection of the State Library of Victoria
Rex Hazlewood (Australian, 1886-1968) [Men drinking billy tea] 1911-1927 Silver gelatin print Collection of the State Library of New South Wales
Anonymous photographer Afternoon tea at “Vivaleigh” 1917 Gelatin silver print 12 x 16cm Collection of the State Library of Victoria
James Fox Barnard (Australian, 1874-1945) Lawn, Arylie, Hobart c. 1900 Glass negative 8.5 x 11cm (quarter plate) Collection of the State Library of Victoria
James Fox Barnard (Australian, 1874-1945) [Tea on the verandah] c. 1900 Glass negative 8.5 x 11cm (quarter plate) Collection of the State Library of Victoria
Installation photograph of the exhibition Storm in a Teacup at the Mornington Peninsula Regional Art Gallery Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Tea is the medium of many a complex and commonplace rituals. Adopted in a variety of ceremonies and customs across the globe, its unique and symbolic place in our lives is subtle and powerful. Whether a quick cuppa around the kitchen table or a lavish display of refined gentility; from billy tea to Asian tea-drinking ceremonies, tea has played an important role in international trade but more curiously in facilitating social cohesiveness.
Comprising approximately 50 works including painting, photography, sculpture and installation Storm in a Teacup features artists such as Chares Blackman, John Perceval, Emma Minnie Boyd, E. Phillips Fox and contemporary artists Stephen Bowers, Danie Mellor, Penny Byrne, Rosalie Gasgoigne, Matthew Sleeth, eX de Medici, Anne Zahalka, Polixeni Papapetrou and a mad tea party installation by Hotham Street Ladies.
Tea is said to have first been invented in China around 2700 BC, with the earliest records of tea consumption dating to 1000BC. Initially consumed as a medicinal drink, it became widely popular as a common beverage and traded across Asia and Europe during the 16th century. It was King Charles II’s wife Catherine of Portugal who is said to have brought the tea habit to Great Britain. Indeed, the afternoon tea party first became fashionable in the seventeenth century following Queen Catherine de Braganza’s fondness for serving the beverage at Whitehall in London. It wasn’t until the 18th century that it became widely consumed with tea smuggling bringing the tipple to the masses and later influenced the Boston Tea Party.
Tea drinking became a demonstration of social aspirations and grew in popularity giving rise to a subtle orchestration of manners, dress and serving paraphernalia which created new forms of commodity consumption. In the colonies of New South Wales and Victoria afternoon tea parties were a lavish display of settler understandings of refined gentility that were an attempt to signal allegiance to the values of the home country and ground the displaced community in their originating culture. In this respect the afternoon tea party expressed collective understandings of British identity and was a means of domesticating and civilising the alien terrain of the colonies.
Press release from the Mornington Peninsula Regional Art Gallery
Clare Humphries (Australian, b. 1973) Family confection II (installation views) 2015 Sugar cubes stained with coffee and tea Dimensions variable Courtesy of the artist Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Giuseppe Romeo (Australian, b. 1958) Subjective landscape, ‘Of consequence rather than reason’ (installation views) 2015 Found discarded objects, bitumen, paint 80 x 100 x 60cm Courtesy of the artist Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Guiseppe Rome asks the simple question: ‘What are you going to do with it all?’
Romeo recalls the tea sets his mother and aunts possessed and the ‘good set’ kept for special occasions that were rarely used. In this work a silver platter is the support for a silver cake stand upon which a teapot, creamer, sugar bowl and various serving implements jostle with items required to clean up the mess. The bat, ball and stumps are a reference to playing cricket which ‘became an excuse for a big afternoon tea party in England’. A ribbon of wire holds it all together ‘like a dream from Alice in Wonderland when nothing is as it seems’, while a tinkling melody from a music box is a lullaby that sends us in to a contented sleep.
Romeo coats the sculpture in bitumen then paints it entirely in white. The effect is reminiscent of excavated items from an ancient ruin, as if we are peering upon the remains from a modern day Pompeii – artefacts that have been covered in lava and buried. This work alludes to the ways in which we deceive ourselves and ‘attempt to keep it all together through consumption but ultimately we can’t’.
Samantha Everton (Australian, b. 1971) Camellia 2009 From the series Vintage dolls 2009 Pigment print on rag paper (ed. AP2) 106 x 114cm Courtesy of the artist and Anthea Polson Art, Queensland
Robyn Phelan (Australian, b. 1965) Porcelain wall – ode to an obsession (installation view) 2010-2015 Porcelain, paper, clay, cobalt oxide, timber, pigment, Jingdezhen tissue transfer 240 x 122 x 42cm Courtesy of the artist Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robyn Phelan (Australian, b. 1965) Porcelain wall – ode to an obsession (installation view detail) 2010-2015 Porcelain, paper, clay, cobalt oxide, timber, pigment, Jingdezhen tissue transfer 240 x 122 x 42cm Courtesy of the artist
Robyn Phelan undertook a residency at the Pottery Workshop and Experimental Sculptural Factory of Jingdezhen, Jiangxi Province in China in 2008. Jingdezhen is known as the porcelain capital because it has been the centre of China’s ceramic production, beginning in the fourteenth century Yuan Dynasty, where fine porcelain was first exported all over the world.
Deposits of kaolinite, a clay found at Mt Kaolin nearby which can sustain very high firing temperatures produced a superior white porcelain of increased strength and translucency. Items made from kaolinite were fired with cobalt landscape designs and were highly sought after by European collectors. Over the centuries, because of excessive mining, the mountain’s deposits have become depleted. Phelan’s work is a lament to the desecration of the mountain and a reminder of the potential destructiveness of consumer desire.
Penny Byrne (Australian, b. 1965) ‘Let’s forget about global warming’ said Alice ‘and have a cup of tea instead!’ (installation view) 2010 Vintage porcelain figurine, found toys, epoxy resin, epoxy putty, retouching medium, powder pigments 80 x 33cm Williams Sinclair Collection Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Penny Byrne (Australian, b. 1965) ‘Let’s forget about global warming’ said Alice ‘and have a cup of tea instead!’ (installation view detail) 2010 Vintage porcelain figurine, found toys, epoxy resin, epoxy putty, retouching medium, powder pigments 80 x 33cm Williams Sinclair Collection Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Penny Byrne’s reworked porcelain conversation piece was motivated by Republican Vice-Presidential nominee Sarah Palin’s cry to ‘drill, baby, drill’ during her campaign in 2008. A call for increase off-shore drilling of petroleum, including sites such as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Palin claimed ‘that’s what we hear all across the country in our rallies because people are so hungry for those domestic sources of energy to be tapped into’.1
In Byrne’s piece the patriotic figures gorge themselves, blithely overindulging without care to the wastage. The new Disney production of Alice in Wonderland directed by Tim Burton had just been released and this led Byrne to reflect upon the Mad Hatter’s tea party in which tea was drunk all day because time stood still and was stuck at tea-time.
1/ Transcript: The Vice-Presidential Debate, 2 October 2008. Reprinted in the New York Times, 23 May 2012.
Sharon West (Australian, b. 1963) Joseph Banks’ tea party for a Botany Bay tribesman is ruined by flies and spiders 2014 Digital print on paper (ed. 2/5) 66 x 57cm (sheet) Courtesy of the artist Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Sharon West’s recreation of an afternoon tea party is set in the early days of first contact. Joseph Banks was the botanist who sailed with Captain Cook on the Endeavour on the first voyage of discovery which mapped the east coast of Australia between 1768 and 1771. While ashore he made an extensive collection of native flora and fauna which was sent back to natural history museums in England. Banks was also instrumental in the British government’s decision to colonise the New South Wales settlement.
Rosalie Gascoigne (b. New Zealand 1917; arr. Australia 1943; d. Canberra 1999) The tea party (installation view) 1980 Painted wood, celluloid, plastic, enamelled metal, feathers 83 x 35 x 20cm Private collection Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Rosalie Gascoigne (b. New Zealand 1917; arr. Australia 1943; d. Canberra 1999) The tea party (installation view detail) 1980 Painted wood, celluloid, plastic, enamelled metal, feathers 83 x 35 x 20cm Private collection Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Rosalie Gascoigne found the kewpie dolls amongst a large number of discarded things from an abandoned sideshow at the Bungendore dump in the summer of 1976. ‘I thought “Oh, those dollies, they’re having a … very joyful … picnic. They’re … in the paddock, they’ve got all these old things … they’ve sat down on the teapots and waved their wings around.”
For Gascoigne beauty existed in the most humble of objects and the wear and tear from use only added to the appeal. The enamel teapots were also found at various dumps and were a particular focus of her collecting.
‘I had a thing about enamelware because I see it as being elegant. People see the holes in it. I was collecting brown and white at the same time. To me it had a sort of elegance that a Dalmatian dog has, spotty, very elegant’.1
1/ Rosalie Gascoigne, excerpts from her correspondence, email communication with Martin Gascoigne, 13 March 2015
Julie Dowling (Australian, b. 1969) Badimaya people, Western Australia White with one 2003 Synthetic polymer paint and red ochre on canvas 121 x 100cm Collection of Jane Kleimeyer and Anthony Stuart
Julie Dowling’s painting is a poignant reminder of the Stolen Generations and the plight of many young girls, forcibly removed from their families, who were brought up in government institutions and trained to be domestic servant to white families. Girls were targeted because women were considered the ‘uplifters’ or ‘civilisers’ of their communities and as future mothers their education into the values of white society was deemed essential to enable successful assimilation. Girls in service were supposed to receive a wage but often this was retained by their employer and not passed on. Dowling points out it is also a history of Stolen wages.
Michael Cook (Australian, b. 1968) Bidjara people, south-west Queensland Object (table) 2015 Inkjet print on Hahnemühle cotton rag (ed. 2/4 + 2AP) 140 x 99cm Courtesy of the artist and THIS IS NO FANTASY + dianne tanzer gallery, Melbourne
Michael Cook’s photographic tableau ‘turns the table’ on racism. By depicting the body of a white woman as a functional object in service to others, Cook considers the dehumanisation and objectification of one race of people by another in the history of slavery.
The double portrait on the back wall is by Johann Zoffany from 1778, and features Dido Elizabeth Belle (1761-1804) who was born into slavery in the West Indies. The daughter of an African mother, her father was an English naval officer who left her to the care of his uncle, Lord William Murray, where she was raised as an equal with Murray’s niece. Murray was instrumental in outlawing slavery in the United Kingdom in 1772. In the painting Zoffany depicts the two women standing together, the niece affectionately reaching out to Belle. Hence Cook’s afternoon tea is also a reminder that prejudice and racial inequality can be surmounted.
Yenny Huber (b. Austria 1980; arr. Australia 2000) Room No. 14 2006 Digital print on aluminium panel (ed. 1/6) 27.2 x 27.2cm Warrnambool Art Gallery, Victoria
Underpinned by the belief that any one person is comprised of diverse, fragmentary and often illusory selves, Yenny Huber explores the various ego states that reside within. This photograph is a self portrait taken in a hotel room, but it is also an impersonation of an identity available to women. Tea-drinking was once described as ‘an infallible sign of an old maid’1 and in this work Huber offers us an image of a good Catholic girl, knees together, elbows in, sitting demurely on the couch sipping tea. It is an image of femininity constrained by the dictates of religion and outdated socially sanctioned ideals of respectable female behaviour.
1/ The Horsham Times, Victoria, 26 April 1898
Anne Zahalka (Australian, b. 1957) Saturday 5.18 pm 1995 1995 (printed 1997) Type C photograph (ed AP) 125 x 162cm Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney Gift of the artist, 2011 Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program
Mornington Peninsula Regional Art Gallery Civic Reserve, Dunns Road, Mornington
Exhibition dates: 19th June – 20th September, 2015
A project for the Triennial of Photography Hamburg 2015
Curators: Dr des. Esther Ruelfs and Teresa Gruber
Invited artists: Laia Abril, Ai Weiwei, Regula Bochsler, Natalie Bookchin, Heman Chong, Aurélien Froment, David Horvitz, Trevor Paglen, Doug Rickard, Taryn Simon, Jens Sundheim, Penelope Umbrico | From the Photography and New Media Collection of the MKG: Fratelli Alinari, Hanns-Jörg Anders, Nobuyoshi Araki, Francis Bedford, Félix Bonfils, Adolphe Braun, Natascha A. Brunswick, Atelier d’Ora / Benda, Minya Diez-Dührkoop, Rudolf Dührkoop, Harold E. Edgerton, Tsuneo Enari, Andreas Feininger, Lotte Genzsch, Johann Hamann, Theodor und Oscar Hofmeister, Thomas Höpker, Lotte Jacobi, Gertrude Käsebier, Kaku Kurita, Atelier Manassé, Hansi Müller-Schorp, Eardweard Muybridge, Arnold Newman, Terry Richardson, Max Scheler, Hildi Schmidt-Heins, Hiromi Tsuchida, Carl Strüwe, Léon Vidal, and more
A fascinating exhibition about the processes of archiving and transferring images and the associated interaction, combining historic and contemporary images to illuminate various chapters: “Sharing a Portrait,” “Sharing a Group,” “Sharing Memories,” “Sharing a Product,” “Sharing Lust,” “Sharing Evidence,” “Sharing Knowledge,” “Sharing the World,” “Sharing a Collection,” and “Sharing Photographs”.
“The chapters juxtapose historical and contemporary works in order to illuminate how the use and function of photographic images have changed and which aspects have remained the same despite the digital revolution. The exhibition begins with photography used in the service of people: to record a life, create a sense of community, or share memories. The following chapters deal with applied contexts, such as advertising photographs, erotic photography, photojournalism, scientific photography, and travel photos.”
“Conceived in archive format, the exhibition explores the archive’s possible forms and uses. The featured works from the collection were selected from the MKG’s holdings of some 75,000 photographs to show how different photographic practices have been assimilated over the years. The springboard for our reflections was the question of how the digital era of picture sharing has changed the function of a museum collection of photography, seeing as today digital image collections are just a mouse click away on online archives such as Google Images.”
But it could have been so much more, especially with 75,000 photographs to choose from. Looking at the plan for the exhibition and viewing the checklist would suggest that the small amount of work in each of the ten chapters leaves little room for any of the themes to be investigated in depth. Any one of these chapters would have made an excellent exhibition in its own right. What an opportunity missed for a series of major exhibitions that examined each important theme.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Text in the posting is from the booklet When We Share More Than Ever.
Editors: Sabine Schulze, Esther Ruelfs, Teresa Gruber Text editors: Esther Ruelfs, Teresa Gruber Authors: Teresa Gruber (TG), Beate Pittnauer (BP), Esther Ruelfs (ER), Sven Schumacher (SS), Annika Sellmann (AS), Taryn Simon (TS), Johan Simonsen (JS), Emma Stenger (ES) Grafikdesign Graphic design exhibition and booklet: Studio Mahr Translation German-English: Jennifer Taylor
Sharing memories
Creating mementoes is one of the central functions of photography. In David Horvitz’s case, it is the mobile phone camera that gives two people a feeling of togetherness. The bond is created through an action. On two different continents, both people stand at the seaside at the same time, recording and sending images of the sunrise and sunset with their iPhones.
Photography connects us with the subject or the person depicted – even beyond the bounds of the time. The photo is an imprint; it transmits to us something that was once really there. Like a fingerprint or a footprint, it remains closely related to what it captures. This special quality of photography predestined it from the start to be a medium of memory. The daguerreotype of a little girl presented in the exhibition is framed by a braid of the child’s hair. The idea of carrying part of a loved one with us and thus generating a special feeling of closeness is reflected in the practice of making friendship or mourning jewellery out of hair – and in the way we treasure portrait photographs as keepsakes of those we love.
Emotional relationships can also be expressed by a certain photographic motif or by the body language of the sitters. The arms of the sisters in the photo by Gertrude Käsebier are closely intertwined, as are the hands of the couple in the daguerreotype by Carl Ferdinand Stelzner. The relationship between photographer and subject may also be the focus of the work. Natascha Brunswick as well as Rudolf Dührkoop and Käsebier use the camera, for example, to capture and hold onto intimate moments with their own families.
With artworks in the form of books, photographs, installations, and actions, David Horvitz often explores varying conceptions of time and space, as well as interpersonal relationships and the dissemination of images via the internet. His work The Distance of a Day brings together all of these topics. With reference to the linguistic origin of the word “journey,” which defined the distance a traveler could cover in a day, Horvitz looks for two places located at opposite ends of the globe that are exactly one day apart. While his mother watches the sun set on a beach in his native California, the artist observes the sun rising over a Maldives island. Both document their simultaneous impressions with an iPhone, a device that today serves both for temporal and spatial orientation and which, as a communication medium, enables us to overcome the limits of space and time. Because it is a conceptual part of the performance, the iPhone is also used in the exhibition as a playback device.
“Maxime carried portraits of actresses in every pocket. He even had one in his cigarette case. From time to time he cleared them all out and moved the ladies into an album (…) which already contained the portraits of Renee’s friends.”
This scene from Émile Zola’s The Kill testifies to the fad that started in the 1860s for mass-produced photographic calling cards, or “cartes de visite.” Contemporaries spoke of “cartomania” – long before anyone could imagine an artist like Ai Weiwei, who has posted 7,142 photographs on his Instagram profile since 2014. With the “invasion of the new calling card pictures,” photography left the private sphere of the middle-class family and fostered new social relationships. The demand for images of celebrities from politics, art, and literature grew as well.
“Galleries of contemporaries” and artist portraits like those produced by Lotte Jacobi and Arnold Newman responded to an avid interest in the physical and physiognomic appearance of well-known people. The photographers tried to capture not only the person’s likeness but also his character, whether inclose-ups that zero in on individual facial expressions or in staged portraits in which the surroundings give clues to the sitter’s personality.
What has changed since then is above all how we handle such images. The photographs that Minya Diez-Dührkoop took of the upper-class daughter Renate Scholz trace her growth and development in pleasingly composed studio portraits. In today’s Internet communities and on smartphones by contrast we encounter the portrait as a profile picture. This signature image, changeable at any time, may be a selfie or selected from a steadily growing pool of snapshots shared among friends.
The photography pioneer William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) notes in his serialised book The Pencil of Nature, published in six parts between 1844 and 1846: “Groups of figures take no longer time to obtain than single figures would require, since the camera depicts them all at once, however numerous they may be.” For groups such as the middle-class family, colleagues in a profession or company, or leisure-time clubs – all of which took on renewed importance in the 19th century – the new technology provided an affordable way to preserve their feeling of community for posterity. The professional photographer was able to stage for the camera a picture designed to convey the self-image of the group. The Hamburg-based photographer Johann Hamann and the Studio Scholz were active around the turn of the 19th century, when the demand for professional group and family portraits reached a high point.
The classic commissioned group portrait still persists today in the form of class photos. These document each individual’s curriculum vitae while serving both as nostalgic souvenirs and as a basis for building a relationship network that can be maintained via websites such as stayfriends.com. On the Internet and especially on Facebook, new types of groups are being generated whose members share specific interests or traits. The artist Natalie Bookchin delves into the phenomenon of the virtual group in her work Mass Ornament, for which she collected amateur videos from YouTube showing people dancing alone and arranged them into an ensemble. She thus examines the possibilities offered by the World Wide Web to bring together crowds of people who are in reality each alone in front of their own screen.
Natalie Bookchin borrowed the title for her video from the prominent sociologist and film theorist Siegfried Kracauer. In his 1927 essay The Mass Ornament, Kracauer described the American dance troupe known as the Tiller Girls as the embodiment of capitalist production conditions after the First World War. He equated the automaton-like movements of the anonymous, interchangeable dancers with the assembly-line work in the factories. Bookchin’s work can likewise be understood as social commentary. She collects video clips of people dancing in front of webcams set up in their homes, which are posted on YouTube for all the world to see. The montage of such clips into a group choreography with almost synchronous dance moves paints a picture of individuals who share favourite songs, idols, and yearnings.
Instead of using today’s pop songs as soundtrack, Bookchin revives the movie music from Busby Berkeley’s Gold Diggers and Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (both from 1935). She thus generates an alienating effect while also reflecting on both the positive and negative connotations of movement in a group and of mass media.
The Hamburg photographer Johann Hamann opened his first daylight studio in 1889 in Hamburg’s Gängeviertel but is better known for his work outside the studio. By using a magnesium powder flash, he succeeded in portraying individuals and especially groups in a natural environment even in poor lighting conditions. Butchers, cobblers, and gymnasts posed with their props and wearing their specific “uniforms” before his camera. From 1899 to 1906, Hamann produced a complete set of photos of ship captains working for the Hamburg-based shipping line HAPAG, on behalf of which he also photographed the emigration halls on Veddel Island in the Elbe River. His group photographs provide insights into the working life and club activities in the Hanseatic city around the turn of the century, and are often characterised by situational humour.
Teresa Gruber
Sharing knowledge
A droplet whirling off a rotating oil can, the impact of a falling drop of milk, or a bullet in flight are phenomena whose speed makes them imperceptible to the naked eye. With the help of a telescope or microscope, we can look into the distance and observe things that are too far away, or enlarge things that are too small to see, and with the aid of photography these things can then be captured in images that can be shared.
The objects of artist Trevor Paglen’s interest are military spy satellites, which he locates based on information on amateur websites and then captures using elaborate special cameras. His work draws on the aesthetics of scientific photography, inquiring into our faith in the objectivity of such images – a credibility that runs through the entire history of photography.
With the positivist mood pervading the 19th century, photography was associated much more closely with science than with art. Surveying and recording were central functions assigned to the new medium. The photographic work of Eadweard J. Muybrigde, Harold E. Edgerton, and Impulsphysik GmbH Hamburg-Rissen is associated with this applied context.
Already during the 19th century, however, the confidence invested in photography as a medium for capturing reality was being challenged by the exploration of borderline areas verging on the irrational and by metaphysical speculations. Myth and science overlapped here, especially when it came to recording invisible phenomena such as ultraviolet light, heat rays, and X-rays. These trends are evident in Carl Strüwe’s photomicrographs, which in his proclaimed “New Order” combine the aesthetics of scientific photography with esoteric notions of the archetype.
One year after the invention of the daguerreotype in 1839, a photographic image was already made of the moon. The first stereographic photographs were presented by the chemist and amateur astronomer Warren de la Rue in 1858. Stereo images, which enjoyed great popularity in the latter half of the 19th century, consist of two photographs, which display a scene from slightly different perspectives, thus imitating the viewing angle of the human eyes and generating a spatial impression of the subject when viewed through a stereoscope.
Because the moon is too far from the earth to be able to photograph it from two different angles at once, a stereo photograph is only possible by taking into account optical libration, or the apparent “oscillation” of the moon. Due to the earth’s elliptical orbit, the half of the moon visible from earth is not always exactly the same. For a stereo photograph like the one the publisher Griffith & Griffith offered – certainly not as a scientific document – the shots that were combined were taken at an interval of several months.
More pictures are being taken and digitised than ever before, innumerable snapshots pile up on hard disks and in clouds, are shared via the Internet and commented on. But portals such as Facebook and Flickr as well as professional databases only supersede older forms of archiving, transferring material, and interaction. For the Triennial of Photography Hamburg 2015, the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg (MKG) is examining these new collections and forms of usage. The MKG sees the future-oriented motto of the Triennial, “The Day Will Come,” as an opportunity to reflect on the sharing of images, under the title: When We Share More Than Ever. The exhibition shows how today’s rampant exchange of digital photos links in with the history of the analogue medium. In fact, photography has been a means of capturing, storing, and communicating visual impressions ever since its early days in the 19th century. In ten chapters, selected contexts are examined in which collecting and sharing images has played – and still plays – a role. More than 200 historical works from the MKG’s collection are set in counterpoint against twelve contemporary artistic projects. The present-day artists reflect in their works on the ways digital photography is used as well as on the mechanisms and implications of new media. They focus on the Internet as a new picture archive, with collections of images such as Apple Maps or photos on eBay, and on images such as those exchanged via mobile phones. Important aspects are the digital image collection as a research resource and inspiration for contemporary art, and the relevance of the classic analogue collection in relation to today’s often-invoked image overkill.
The exhibition is conceived as a kind of archive in order to explore the archive’s possible forms and uses. The featured works from the collection were selected from the MKG’s holdings of some 75,000 photographs to show how different photographic practices have been assimilated over the years. Rather than being a collection of only art photography, the MKG archive reflects the everyday uses of the medium. It gathers together various photographic applications, whether the scientific photos taken at an institute for impulse physics, the fashion spread created by Terry Richardson for Sisley, or Max Scheler’s report on Liverpool’s club scene for Stern magazine.
The chapters “Sharing a Portrait,” “Sharing a Group,” “Sharing Memories,” “Sharing a Product,” “Sharing Lust,” “Sharing Evidence,” “Sharing Knowledge,” “Sharing the World,” “Sharing a Collection,” and “Sharing Photographs” juxtapose historical and contemporary works in order to illuminate how the use and function of photographic images have changed and which aspects have remained the same despite the digital revolution. The exhibition begins with photography used in the service of people: to record a life, create a sense of community, or share memories. The following chapters deal with applied contexts, such as advertising photographs, erotic photography, photojournalism, scientific photography, and travel photos.
We share memories: While in the old days a manageable number of photographs found their way into albums, which were then taken out and perused on special family occasions, on today’s sharing platforms thousands of images are constantly being shared and “liked” around the clock. The works on view include pictures of Renate Scholz, whose affluent parents had the studio photographer Minya Diez-Dührkoop record each stage of her growth and development for fifteen years in annual portrait sessions. Studio portraits have been replaced today by snapshots, while the family photo album is complemented by the Internet portal Instagram. Ai Weiwei began in 2006 to post his diary photos in a text/image blog, which was taken offline by the Chinese authorities in 2009. Since 2014 he has been publishing daily picture messages on Instagram which are readable across language barriers.
We share the world: Starting in 1860, the Fratelli Alinari produced photographs that brought the art treasures of Italy to living rooms everywhere. As an armchair traveler, the 19th-century burgher could feel like a conqueror of far-off lands. Today, the same kind of cultural appropriation takes place instead on computer screens. Regula Bochsler and Jens Sundheim explore landscapes and cities via webcams and Apple Maps. And instead of traveling like a photojournalist to real-world hotbeds of social ferment, Doug Rickard journeys to the dark reaches of the YouTube universe. He shows us ostensibly private scenes not meant for public consumption – drug abuse, racial and sexual violence. The low-resolution, heavily pixelated stills excerpted from mobile phone videos suggest authenticity and turn us into silent witnesses and voyeurs.
We share knowledge: From its earliest days, photography has been indispensable for storing and sharing the results of scientific research and military expeditions. Trevor Paglen uses powerful precision astronomical telescopes to make “invisible” things visible, for example the American “Misty 2” stealth satellites used for reconnaissance, or a dummy put in place by the military intelligence service. In order to locate these satellites, Paglen actively participates in various networks set up by amateur satellite observers.
We share image collections: Before the invention of Google Image Search, analogue photo collections provided an opportunity to compare images. Museum archive cabinets can be seen as a precursor to today’s digital image databases. The Internet is increasingly taking on the function of a picture library, opening up new possibilities for classification and research. Artists like Taryn Simon investigate image collections to ascertain their ordering systems and their implications. Who controls what images we get to see and which ones vanish in the depths of the archives? Part of this chapter is the project “Sharing Blogs“.
The exhibition is dedicated to the broader question of how the function of a museum collection of photography has changed in the digital era, when vast digital image archives are only a mouse click away thanks to Google Image Search. The exhibits are arranged on a horizontal axis, in keeping with modern notions of how a database is set up. Everything is thus presented on a “neutral” plane, and the visitors are tasked with placing the images in context with the help of a “search aid” in the form of a booklet.”
Press release from Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg
Sharing the World
Google Earth and the 3D Flyover feature of the Apple Maps software make the world accessible to all of us through images. The idea of a comprehensive photographic world archive that would be available to the general public began to spread soon after the invention of photography. In parallel with the expansion of the railway network in the mid-19th century, photographic societies were founded in France and the United Kingdom with plans to make, archive, and preserve pictures of cities, cultural heritage, and landscapes. Governments organised expeditions to photograph their dominions, and photographers and companies began specialising in producing picturesque scenes echoing the tradition of painted landscapes and engraved vedutes, developing a successful business model with international sales channels. Views of popular tourist attractions – for example famous buildings in Italy – were offered as an early form of souvenir. At the same time, such pictures allowed the Biedermeier burgher back home in his living room to become an armchair traveler without taking on the exertions and expense of visiting far-off places – just as the Internet surfer is able to do today.
Artistic works such as those by Regula Bochsler confront representations of reality on the World Wide Web that are ostensibly democratic and yet are in fact controlled by corporations. Bochsler has culled subjective images from the liquefied, constantly updated parallel universe and given them a lasting material form.
For her project The Rendering Eye, the historian Regula Bochsler has been traveling through a virtual parallel universe since 2013 using the 3D flyover feature in Apple Maps. Unlike Google Streetview, Apple Maps gives the viewer a volumetric impression of cities and landscapes. In order to create these views, the mapped zones are scanned from an airplane using several cameras aligned at different angles. With the help of vector graphics as well as actual maps and satellite images, the software then automatically merges the countless overlapping photographs into a realistic view. The program was developed for the purpose of steering military rockets by the Swedish defence company Saab, which sold it to Apple in 2011 for around 240 million dollars. Under the pressure of competition from Google, Apple released its app before some major development bugs could be fixed. In her surreal-looking, carefully composed views of American cities, Bochsler preserves for posterity the image errors ( so-called “glitches”) in the program, which are gradually being corrected and disappearing, as well as the still-visible areas where photographs taken at different times are patched together. The result is an apocalyptic vision of a world of technoid artificiality and absolute control.
Catastrophes and events are documented today by eyewitnesses at close range and communicated over the Internet. Mobile phone cameras even enable images to be transmitted directly: people involved in the incidents can share their perspective with a wide audience, the poor quality of the pixelated images often being perceived as a guarantee of their authenticity and credibility. The artist Doug Rickard also relies on this effect when he provides inside glimpses of marginal areas of American society on YouTube, assembling them to create picture stories that can be compared to classic photo reportage. By the early 1900s, photographic images were already established as evidence and information material that could be printed in newspapers. During World War II, the suitability of the medium as a means for objective documentation was then fundamentally called into question as photos were exploited for political propaganda purposes. Nevertheless, photojournalism experienced a heyday in the 1960s and 70s, before serious competition in the form of television posed a threat to print media and many magazines discontinued publication. Photographers such as Thomas Hoepker and Max Scheler supplied personal picture essays to Stern magazine in Hamburg that gave readers a look at different countries and told of the destinies of various individuals. With today’s citizen journalism, the evidential value of the photographic image seems to have once again regained its importance.
In 1859, Charles Baudelaire derided the “thousands of greedy eyes” indulging in the shameless enjoyment of “obscene” photographs. He was referring in particular to stereoscopic images, which convey a realistic corporeal impression of piquant subjects when seen through a special optical device. In parallel with the spread of the photographic medium, the sales of erotic and pornographic pictures grew into a lucrative business. European production centres for such material were located around 1900 in the cities of Paris, Vienna, and Budapest. Illegal pictures could be had from vendors operating near train stations or through discreet mail-order. Two daguerreotypes in the Photography and New Media Collection bear witness to the early days of this pictorial tradition.
Starting in the 1910s, the new vogue for magazines and pin-ups coming out of the USA served to democratise and popularise erotic imagery. Studio Manassé in Vienna, for example, supplied numerous magazines with such photographs. While erotic imagery was increasingly co-opted by advertising, a new industry arose: the pornographic film, which increasingly competed with print media. Today, the spread of pornographic imagery on the Internet has taken on immense proportions, while digital technology has led to a boom in the sharing of amateur photos and films, as well as their commercialisation. Laia Abril shows by-products of this online marketing of private sex in her video work Tediousphilia.
Fragmented through artfully knotted ropes, the nude bodies of young women in Nobuyoshi Araki’s photographs are turned into objects of voyeuristic curiosity. Critical opinions in the literature are divided, with some emphasising the pictorial character of the images and others accusing the photographer of a sexist point of view catering to the exotic tastes of the European public. Araki’s photographs have thus set off a discussion on where to draw the line between pornography and art.
Araki’s photos were exhibited in the West for the first time in 1992. The show featured views of Tokyo, still lifes, and female nudes that dealt with love, loss, and sexuality – all intertwined into a very personal narration. From that point forward, the perception of Araki’s images became very selective, and at the latest with Tokyo Lucky Hole (1997) the obscene aspect came to the fore. In the 1980s, the photographer explored the escalating sex and entertainment boom in Tokyo. Araki himself insists on varied applications for his photographs. He displays them in a wide range of exhibition venues, from soup kitchens to museums, and publishes his images in art books as well as in porn magazines, S&M periodicals, and popular calendars. The images in the collection of the MKG were acquired in the mid-1980s, at a time when Araki was still unknown in Europe. The choices made already anticipate the selective perception of his work in the 1990s.
Laia Abril’s series Tediousphilia shows young couples who set up a webcam in their bedroom in order to earn money by giving customers an intimate peek at their ostensibly private sex lives. This online peepshow concept is a phenomenon of the commercialisation of private sex on the internet. Abril is interested in the moments before the sexual act, taking a look behind the scenes, as it were, where the couples succumb to the lethargy of waiting while the camera is already rolling. The title is thus composed of the word tedious and the Greek term philia, indicating a preference or inclination, referring to the embracing of boredom before the impending performance. These “pre-intimate” moments seem almost more real and personal than what we imagine the pseudo-private performances must be like. The images of the waiting lovers illuminate the voyeuristic relationship between audience and performer, between private and public, focusing, as in other works by Abril, on themes such as sexuality, intimacy, and the media representation of human bodies.
Emma Stenger
Sharing products
Since the 1920s, consumer products have been advertised primarily through photographic images. Fuelled by the rapidly developing field of advertising and by advances in printing techniques, advertising photos began to proliferate in newspapers and magazines and on billboards. Advertisers increasingly relied on the suggestive power of the photographic images rather than on text or drawings as before.
Johannes Grubenbecher had his students take pictures of objects of daily use as a way of preparing them for work in the advertising field. The arrangement of object shots demonstrates the form and materiality of the items and reflect the image language of the 1920s, which focused on functionality and faithfulness to materials. By contrast, the commercial photographs by Hildi Schmidt-Heins and Arthur Benda from the 1930s stylise the objects as consumer fetishes. Benda has draped a silk nightgown as though it had just slipped off a woman’s shoulders and onto the floor in order to whet the observer’s desires, which he should then transfer onto the goods.
Today, nothing has changed in the fetishisation of merchandise through professional product photography. New, however, are the non-professional snapshots on consumer-to-consumer platforms such as eBay. Household items that are no longer needed are photographed by the owners themselves for sale to others. Penelope Umbrico uses this imagery in her work. She has collected photographs of tube televisions – an outdated technique – and presents them as a comment on the changes in our use of images brought about by inexpensive and ubiquitous digital photography, making pictures easy to upload to the appropriate platforms.
The sandwich boards created by Hildi Schmidt-Heins for the Stuhr Coffee Roastery and the Gartmann Chocolate Factory appeared as still images on Hamburg’s movie screens in 1937. She used open packaging so that potential customers could see the food product inside and also recognise it easily in the store. Her few commissions for advertisements came from her photography lecturer Johannes Grubenbecher during her studies at the Hansa Academy for Visual Arts. Schmidt-Heins focused in her studies on typeface design, attending the class conducted by the graphic designer Hugo Meier-Thur. Her silver gelatin prints with tempera lettering present a method of visual communication that fuses typography with product photography. Later, the photographer dedicated herself to the documentation of workspaces, taking pictures of workshops.
In her tableau Signals Still, Penelope Umbrico presents a collection of six sets of eleven photographs each of illuminated, imageless screens. The product photos were taken by the owners of the devices in order to provide proof of their working order to potential buyers. Umbrico scours consumer-to-consumer marketplaces like eBay and Craigslist for such images and groups them into individual types. By transforming the intangible pixel images into C-prints on Kodak paper, Umbrico then distances them from their original function as digital communication media. The artist appropriates the found material and imposes on it a shift in meaning. Minimal deviations in the angle of the shot and variations in the forms and colours of the monochromatic snowy light surfaces combine to form a collective template. The promise of modern technology – progress and mass availability – is juxtaposed with its somber flip side of obsolescence and superfluity. Umbrico’s use of contemporary digital media unites the tired flicker of the television screens into a chorus singing the requiem of an era.
Annika Sellmann
Sharing collections
“According to which criteria should a collection be organised? Perhaps by individual lectures, by masters, chronologically, topographically, or by material?” asked the curator Wilhelm Weimar in 1917. His query was prompted by the production of a slide cabinet holding 7,600 slides. His solution was to furnish each image carrier with a numerical code, so that they could be cross-referenced with a card catalogue in which the objects were filed under various keywords. His search aid was an early form of database.
Like this slide collection, the photographic reproductions created by Léon Vidal and Adolphe Braun to record and disseminate art treasures can also be understood as precursors to digital databases. Today, search engines such as Google Images are available to anyone with an Internet connection, presenting with their infinite number of comparison pictures a plethora of new possibilities for ordering and research, and supplanting the function of the photographic collection as image database. Photographs are no longer bound as physical media to a single storage location but have become immaterial and thus available anytime, anywhere. Images that once slumbered in archives, organised by strict criteria for ease of retrieval, become in Aurélien Froment’s film weightless ephemera. A magician moves them through space with a sweep of his hand, just as the modern user swipes his pictures across the digital interface.
Taryn Simon is also interested in such image ordering systems and how the images in them are accessed. By entering identical search terms in various national image search engines in her Image Atlas and then examining the standardised search results, she inquires into what the new archives remember and what they forget.
In the late 1890s, photography’s triumphant advance also had an impact on the everyday work of the MKG. Under Justus Brinckmann, the museum’s first director, the objects in the collection were regularly recorded for the files with the help of a camera. The self-taught photographer Wilhelm Weimar, initially employed by the museum as a draftsman, thus managed in the course of fifteen years to produce some 1,700 shots of pieces in the collection. The prints were mounted on cardboard and filed according to functional groups. In case of theft or suspected counterfeiting, the object photos also served Brinckmann as evidence hat could be sent by post within a network of museums.
Art history as an academic discipline worked from the outset with photographic reproductions, which made it possible to compare far-flung works and to bring them together in a shared historical context. In his essay Le Musée imaginaire, author André Malraux even makes the claim that the history of art has been tantamount since the 19th century to the “history of the photographable.” The over 7,000 slides the museum has preserved of its own holdings and other objects, together with architectural images and exhibition photographs, were assembled for use in slide presentations, compellingly illustrating this idea of a museum without walls which can be rearranged at will according to prevailing contemporary thinking.
The work Théâtre de Poche (2007) showcases in a seemingly infinite black space a contemporary form of magic with images. A magician in a trance-like state pushes photographs across an invisible surface like an iPhone user swiping through information on his touch screen. His sweeping motions pass through thin air, like those of a player at a Wii station. Froment thus connects these gestures, obviously influenced by contemporary electronic user interfaces, with a centuries old magic technique. The images, consisting of family photos, playing cards, found film stills, reproductions of non-European art, and arts and crafts items, are rearranged in new juxtapositions. They are resorted, lined up, and rethought, recalling Aby Warburg’s panels for his Mnemosyne Atlas. The artist is interested here in the discrepancy between sign and meaning, exploring how it shifts when the images are placed in new contexts and new, weightless archives.
Dr des. Esther Ruelfs
Sharing photographs
At the end of the 19th century, more and more amateur and professional photographers came together in the major cities of Europe to form groups. They shared the conviction that photography should be seen as an independent artistic medium, and they sought a forum in which to present their works. Magazines such as Camera Work, which was distributed internationally, as well as joint exhibitions, encouraged lively exchanges about stylistic developments and technical procedures while serving to expand and strengthen the network. The Pictorialists saw their pictures not as a mere medium for communicating information or as illustrations: they instead shared the photographs themselves as pictures in their own right, with a focus on their composition and the details of their execution.
The Hofmeister brothers put their artworks into circulation as photo postcards. The artist Heman Chong picks up on this popular tradition of collecting and sharing images by reproducing his numerous photographs as cards, taking recourse to the “old” medium of the postcard to highlight the fact that photographs are today mainly immaterial images shared via the Internet.
Platforms like Instagram and Flickr define themselves as global “photo communities” with millions of users and thousands of uploads per second. Image data is archived there, groups founded, albums curated, and an interactive space created through keywording with tags and comment functions. For the exhibition When We Share More Than Ever, examples of such virtual galleries are presented with commentary on the blog http://sharingmorethanever.tumblr.com/.
Theodor and Oscar Hofmeister, one a merchant and the other a judicial employee, discovered their passion for photography in the 1890s. Upon viewing international photography exhibitions at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, they became acquainted with the Viennese Pictorialists and were inspired to adopt similarly picturesque imagery coupled with advanced technical implementation. Starting in 1895, they began to exhibit their work and were soon recognised internationally as specialists in the multicolour gum bichromate printing process. Some of their large-format one-off images are found in the collection of the MKG.
A good idea of the brothers’ prodigious productivity and clever marketing is however supplied by their landscape scenes, which Munich publisher Hermann A. Wiechmann reproduced using the rotogravure process. He published these scenes taken on rambles through the countryside, meant to reflect the “characteristic effect” of various parts of the country and hence the “German soul,” in over twenty “homeland books,” combining them with poems by German authors, as well as in portfolios and as “Hofmeister picture postcards.” The Hofmeister brothers themselves amassed an extensive collection of postcards of their own making – addressed in some cases to family members – as well as copies of postcards by other photographers.
In his conceptual works, the artist, writer, and curator Heman Chong often deals with social practices and different kinds of archives. The installation God Bless Diana presents 550 postcards as if in a museum shop display. The artist is alluding here to the contemporary flood of commercial and private photographs, inviting the viewer to respond and make his own selections. Chong offers viewers scenes evoking ephemeral traces and grotesque situations he has filtered out of the daily big-city jungle in Beijing, London, New York, and Singapore and captured on analogue 35mm film. In contrast to the data in an Internet image archive, the postcards are actual material objects: for one euro, as symbolic antipode to the exorbitant art market prices, the exhibition visitor can purchase his favourites among these works, take them home with him, and use them to curate his own “show” or as the bearer of a written message, thus sharing them with friends.
Teresa Gruber
Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg Steintorplatz, 20099 Hamburg
Curator: Dr. Mikhail Dedinkin, curator from the State Hermitage Museum supported by NGV Director Tony Ellwood and Dr. Ted Gott, Senior Curator of International Art at the NGV
Hermitage Museum, the Winter Palace in Winter, St Petersburg Photo: Pavel Demidov
Some beauty to cheer me up from my sickbed.
These are the official press photographs for the exhibition Masterpieces from the Hermitage: The Legacy of Catherine the Great. To see my installation photographs of the exhibition go to this posting.
The paintings look as fresh today as when they were first painted, some of them in the early 1500s. To see the thumbs up gesture in Diego Velázquez’s Luncheon (c. 1617-1618, below) echoing down the centuries, is worth the price of admission alone.
We cannot imagine what life would have been like back then… no medication, rampant disease and malnutrition, little law enforcement with danger lurking around each turn (see Matthew Beaumont. Night Walking: A Nocturnal History of London, Chaucer to Dickens. London and New York: Verso, 2015).
And yet these talented artists, supported by the elite, produced work which still touches us today.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the National Gallery of Victoria for allowing me to publish the art works in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the art works. See Part 1 of the posting.
Chinese Cup early 17th century Silver, enamel 4 x 3 x 7cm The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ЛС-133, ВВс-250) Acquired before 1789
Chinese Teapot with lid 17th century Silver, enamel 18.0 x 5.5cm The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ЛС-80 а, б, ВВс-219) Acquired before 1789
Sèvres Porcelain Factory Sèvres (manufacturer) France est. 1756 Cameo Service 1778-1779 Porcelain (soft-paste), gilt The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg Commissioned by Catherine ll as a gift for Prince Grigory Potemkin in 1777; Potemkin’s Taurida Palace, St Petersburg from 1779; transferred to the Hofmarshal’s Office of the Winter Palace after his death; 1922 transferred to the State Hermitage Museum
Grand Duchess Maria Fyodorovna (Russian, 1795-1828) (engraver) Russia (manufacturer) Catherine the Great as Minerva 1789 Cameo Jasper, gold 6.5 x 4.7cm The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. К 1077) Acquired 1789
James Tassie, London (England, 1735-1799) (workshop of) Head of Medusa 1780s Coloured glass, gilded paper 7.6 x 9.2cm The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. R-T, 3296 a) Purchased from James Tassie 1783-88
Chinese Toilet service early 18th century Glass, mercury amalgam, paper, silver, filigree, parcel-gilt, wood, velvet, peacock and king-fisher feathers, mother-of-pearl, crystals The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ЛС-472/ 1,2, ВВс-373)
Chinese Table decoration in the form of a pair of birds 1740s-50s Silver, enamel, silver-gilt 26.0 x 26.0 x 15.0cm The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ЛС-26, ВВс-189)
Chinese Crab-shaped box on a leaf tray 1740s-50s Silver, enamel, silver-gilt (a) 4.0 x 14.0 x 13.0cm (box) (b) 3.0 x 22.0 x 17.0cm (stand) The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ЛС-9 а,б, ВВс-186)
Marie-Anne Collot (French, 1748-1821) Voltaire 1770s Marble 49 x 30 x 28cm The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. Н.ск. 3) Acquired from the artist, 1778
Jean-Antoine Houdon (French, 1741-1828) Catherine II 1773 Marble 90 x 50 x 32cm The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. Н.ск. 1676) Transferred from the Stroganov Palace, Leningrad, 1928
Jean-Baptiste Greuze (French, 1725-1805) Head of an old man. Study for The paralytic 1760s Red and black chalk 49.3 x 40cm (sheet) The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ОР-14727) Acquired from the artist in 1769 for the Museum of the Academy of Arts. Transferred to the Hermitage in 1924
François Boucher (French, 1703-1770) Study of a female nude 1740 Red, black and white chalk on brown paper 26.2 x 34.6cm The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ОР-382) Acquired from the collection of Count Cobenzl, Brussels, 1768
Charles-Louis Clérisseau (French, 1721-1820) Design for the paintings in the cell of Father Lesueur in the Monastery of Santissima Trinità dei Monti in Rome 1766-1768 Pen and black and brown ink, brown and grey wash 36.9 x 53cm (sheet) The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ОР-2597) Acquired from the artist by Catherine II on 5 May 1780, Provenance: before 1797
Carlo Galli-Bibiena (Austrian, 1728-1787) Design for the interior decoration of a library 1770s Pen and ink, grey wash and watercolour over pencil 32 х 44cm (sheet) The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ОР-231) Acquired before 1797
Giacomo Quarenghi (Italian, 1744-1817) Façade of the Hermitage Theatre 1780s Pen and ink, watercolour 33 х 47cm (sheet) The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ОР-9626) Acquired from Giulio Quarenghi in 1818
Konstantin Ukhtomsky (Russian, 1818-1881) The Raphael Loggia 1860 Watercolour 42 х 25cm The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ОР-11741) Acquired from the artist, 1860
Over 500 works from the personal collection of Catherine the Great will travel to Australia in July. Gathered over a 34-year period, the exhibition represents the foundation of the Hermitage’s collection and includes outstanding works from artists such as Rembrandt, Velasquez, Rubens and Titian. Exemplary works from Van Dyck, Snyders, Teniers and Hals will also travel, collectively offering some of the finest Dutch and Flemish art to come to Australia. The exhibition, presented by the Hermitage Museum, National Gallery of Victoria and Art Exhibitions Australia, is exclusive to Melbourne as part of the Melbourne Winter Masterpieces series.
The Premier of Victoria, the Hon. Daniel Andrews MP said: “Masterpieces from the Hermitage: The Legacy of Catherine the Great will showcase treasures from one of the largest, oldest and most visited museums in the world. Another major event for Melbourne, this exhibition will provide visitors with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see first-hand the extraordinary personal collection of Catherine the Great, drawn from the Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg.”
NGV Director, Tony Ellwood said, “This exhibition celebrates the tenacity and vision of a true innovator in the arts. Catherine the Great’s inexhaustible passion for the arts, education and culture heralded a renaissance, leading to the formation of one of the world’s great museums, the Hermitage.”
“We are delighted that we have the good fortune of bringing one of the world’s most important collections to Australian audiences. The exhibition is a rare opportunity to be immersed in the world of Catherine the Great and her magnificent collection of art,” Tony Ellwood said.
Catherine the Great’s reign from 1762 to 1796 was known as the golden age and is remembered for her exceptional patronage of the arts, literature and education. Of German heritage, Catherine the Great was well connected in European art and literature circles. She saw herself as a reine-philosophe (Philosopher Queen), a new kind of ruler in the Age of Enlightenment. Guided by Europe’s leading intellectuals, such as the French philosophers Voltaire and Diderot, she sought to modernise Russia’s economy, industry and government, drawing inspiration both from classical antiquity and contemporary cultural and political developments in Western Europe.
A prolific acquirer of art of the period, Catherine the Great’s collection reflects the finest contemporary art of the 18th century as well as the world’s best old masters of the time, with great works by French, German, Chinese, British, Dutch and Flemish artists. Notable in this exhibition are entire groups of works acquired from renowned collections from France, Germany and England representing the best collections offered for sale at the time. The exhibition will feature four Rembrandts, including the notable Young woman with earrings, known as one of most intimate images Rembrandt ever created. The exhibition will also include 80 particularly fine drawings by artists including Poussin, Rubens, Clouet and Greuze.
Exquisite decorative arts will be brought to Australia for this exhibition, including 60 items from the Cameo Service of striking enamel-painted porcelain made by the Sèvres Porcelain Manufactory in Paris. Commissioned by Catherine the Great for her former lover and military commander, Prince Grigory Potemkin, the dinner service features carved and painted imitation cameos, miniature works of art, based on motifs from the French Royal collection.
Director of the Hermitage Museum, Mikhail Piotrovsky said, “These outstanding works from the personal collection of Catherine the Great represent the crown jewels of the Museum. It was through the collection of these works and Catherine the Great’s exceptional vision that the Hermitage was founded. Today it is one of the most visited museums in the world. We are very pleased to be able to share these precious works with Australian audiences at the 250-year anniversary of this important institution.”
Catherine the Great’s love of education, art and culture inspired a period of enlightenment and architectural renaissance that saw the construction of the Hermitage complex. This construction includes six historic buildings along the Palace Embankment as well as the spectacular Winter Palace, a former residence of Russian emperors. On view in the exhibition will be remarkable drawings by the Hermitage’s first architects Georg Velten and Giacomo Quarenghi, complemented by excellent painted views of the new Hermitage by Benjamin Patersen. These, along with Alexander Roslin’s majestic life-size portrait of Catherine, set the scene for a truly spectacular exhibition.
Visitors to the exhibition will be able to immerse themselves in Catherine the Great’s world evoking a sensory experience of a visit to the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. The exhibition design will have rich treatments of architectural details, interior furnishings, wallpapers and a colour palette directly inspired by the Hermitage’s gallery spaces. Enveloping multimedia elements will give visitors a sense of being inside the Hermitage, evoking the lush and opulent interiors.
The Hermitage Museum was founded in 1764 by Catherine the Great and has been open to the public since 1852. With 3 million items in its holdings, the Hermitage is often regarded as having the finest collection of paintings in the world today. In 2014, The Hermitage celebrated its 250-year anniversary and opened a new wing of the museum with 800 rooms dedicated to art from the 19th to 21st centuries. The exhibition is organised by The Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg in association with the National Gallery of Victoria and Art Exhibitions Australia.
Masterpieces from the Hermitage: The Legacy of Catherine the Great will be at NGV International from 31 July – 8 November 2015 and will be presented alongside the David Bowie is exhibition at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image as part of the 2015 Melbourne Winter Masterpieces series.
Press release from the National Gallery of Victoria
Jean-Baptiste Santerre (French, 1651-1717) Two actresses 1699 Oil on canvas 146 х 114cm The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ГЭ-1284) Acquired 1768
Anthony van Dyck (Flemish, 1599-1641) Portrait of Philadelphia and Elizabeth Wharton 1640 Oil on canvas 162 х 130cm The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ГЭ-533) Acquired from the collection of Sir Robert Walpole, Houghton Hall, 1779
Jean Louis Voille (French, 1744-1804) Portrait of Olga Zherebtsova 1790s Oil on canvas 73.5 х 58cm The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ГЭ-5654) Acquired from the collection of E. P. Oliv, Petrograd, 1923
Peter Paul Rubens and workshop (Flemish, 1577-1640) The Apostle Paul c. 1615 Oil on wood panel 105.6 х 74cm The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ГЭ-489) Acquired before 1774
Leonardo Da Vinci (school of) Female nude (Donna Nuda) Early 16th century Oil on canvas 86.5 х 66.5cm The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ГЭ-110) Acquired from the collection of Sir Robert Walpole, Houghton Hall, 1779
Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (Dutch, 1606-1669) Portrait of a scholar 1631 Oil on canvas 104.5 х 92cm The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ГЭ-744) Acquired from the collection of Count Heinrich von Brühl, Dresden, 1769
Jean-Baptiste Perronneau (French, 1715-1783) Portrait of a boy with a book 1740s Oil on canvas 63.0 х 52cm The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ГЭ-1270) Acquired from the collection of A. G. Teplov, St Petersburg, 1781
Domenico Capriolo (Italian, c. 1494-1528) Portrait of a young man 1512 Oil on canvas 117 х 85cm The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ГЭ-21) Acquired from the collection of Baron Louis-Antoine Crozat de Thiers, Paris, 1772
Alexander Roslin (Swedish, 1718-1793) Portrait of Catherine II 1776-1777 Oil on canvas 271 х 189.5cm The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ГЭ-1316) Acquired from the artist, 1777
Titian (Italian, 1485-1490 – 1576) Portrait of a young woman c. 1536 Oil on canvas 96 х 75cm The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ГЭ-71) Acquired from the collection of Baron Louis-Antoine Crozat de Thiers, Paris, 1772
Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (Dutch, 1606-1669) Young woman trying on earrings 1657 Oil on wood panel 39.5 х 32.5cm The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ГЭ-784) Acquired from the collection of the Comte de Baudouin, Paris, 1781
Francois Clouet (French, c. 1516-1572) Portrait of Charles IX 1566 Black and red chalk 33.1 x 22.5cm (sheet) The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. OР-2893) Acquired from the collection of Count Cobenzl, Brussels, 1768
David Teniers II (Flemish, 1610-1690) Kitchen 1646 Oil on canvas 171 х 237cm The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ГЭ-586) Acquired from the collection of Sir Robert Walpole, Houghton Hall, 1779
Cornelis de Vos (Dutch/Flemish, c. 1584-1651) Self-portrait of the artist with his wife Suzanne Cock and their children c. 1634 Oil on canvas 185.5 х 221cm The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ГЭ-623) Donated by Prince G. A. Potemkin, 1780s
Anthony van Dyck (Flemish, 1599-1641) Family portrait c. 1619 Oil on canvas 113.5 х 93.5cm The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ГЭ-534) Acquired from a private collection, Brussels, 1774
Charles Vanloo (French, 1705-1765) Sultan’s wife drinking coffee 1750s Oil on canvas 120 х 127cm The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ГЭ-7489) Acquired from the collection of Madame Marie-Thérèse Geoffrin, Paris, 1772
Peter Paul Rubens and workshop (Flemish, 1577-1640) The Adoration of the Magi c. 1620 Oil on canvas 235 х 277.5cm The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. № ГЭ-494) Acquired from the collection of Dufresne, Amsterdam, 1770
Diego Velázquez (Spanish, 1599-1660) Luncheon c. 1617-1618 Oil on canvas 108.5 х 102cm The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ГЭ-389) Acquired 1763-1774
Melchior d’Hondecoeter (Dutch, 1636-1695) Birds in a park 1686 Oil on canvas 136 х 164cm The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ГЭ-1042) Acquired from the collection of Jacques Aved, Paris, 1766
Frans Snyders (Flemish, 1579-1657) Concert of birds 1630-1640 Oil on canvas 136.5 х 240cm The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Inv. no. ГЭ-607) Acquired from the collection of Sir Robert Walpole, Houghton Hall, 1779
Elizabeth Conrad Hickox (Karuk) Somes Bar, California “Fancy” lidded basket c. 1917-1926 Conifer root, maidenhair fern stems, porcupine quills, hazel shoots Courtesy American Federation of Arts Diker no. 445
Just one word: glorious.
And to think, these disparate cultures were nearly wiped out through genocide enacted upon them by the white race.
Marcus
Many thankx to the Amon Carter Museum of American Art for allowing me to publish the art work in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Louisa Keyser (also known as Datsolalee, Washoe) Carson City, Nevada Basket bowl 1907 Willow shoots, redbud shoots, bracken fern root Courtesy American Federation of Arts Diker no. 326
Drawn from the celebrated American Indian art collection of Charles and Valerie Diker, Indigenous Beauty: Masterworks of American Indian Art from the Diker Collection showcases approximately 120 masterworks, including fine examples of basketry, pottery, sculpture, ivories, kachina dolls, regalia, and pictographic arts from tribes across the North American continent. The exhibition provides rare access to many exquisite works from one of the most comprehensive and diverse collections of American Indian art in private hands.
Indigenous Beauty is organised by the American Federation of Arts. This exhibition was made possible by the generosity of an anonymous donor, the JFM Foundation, and Mrs. Donald Cox.
Text from the Amon Carter website
Nampeyo (Hopi-Tewa) Hano Village, Hopi, Arizona Water jar c. 1900 Clay, slip Courtesy American Federation of Arts Diker no. 824
Ancestral Pueblo New Mexico Water jar c. 1150 Clay, slip Courtesy American Federation of Arts Diker no. 313
Old Bering Sea III culture Bering Strait region, Alaska Harpoon counterweight (Winged object) 5th-9th century Walrus ivory Courtesy American Federation of Arts Diker no. 731
Niimiipu (Nez Perce) Oregon or Idaho Man’s shirt c. 1850 Hide, porcupine quills, horsehair, wool, glass beads, pigment Courtesy American Federation of Arts Diker no. 666
Julian Scott ledger Artist B (Ka’igwu [Kiowa]) Kiowa and Comanche Indian Reservation, Oklahoma Twelve High-Ranking Kiowa Men Nd Pencil, coloured pencil, and ink on paper Courtesy American Federation of Arts Diker no. 059 LD
This summer, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art presents the traveling exhibition Indigenous Beauty: Masterworks of American Indian Art from the Diker Collection. Organised by the American Federation of Arts (AFA), the exhibition is drawn from the celebrated holdings of Charles and Valerie Diker and features approximately 120 masterworks representing tribes across the North American continent. The exhibition is on view at the Amon Carter from July 7 through September 13, 2015.
“This exhibition has been shaped by the Dikers’ passion for Native American art, and their collection is renowned as one of the largest and most comprehensive in private hands,” says AFA Director Pauline Willis. “We are delighted to bring these exquisite works to Fort Worth.”
Selections from the collection have been presented previously at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1998-2000) and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (2003-2006), but Indigenous Beauty showcases recent acquisitions never before seen by the public. This is the first traveling exhibition curated from this remarkable collection.
“Charles and Valerie Diker are collectors and stewards of exceptional works of art from all corners of native North America, and audiences will be awed by the transformative spirit of creativity of the First Peoples whose ‘art schools’ were their families and communities,” says Barbara Brotherton, curator of Native American Art at the Seattle Art Museum. “This traveling exhibition and accompanying catalogue will invigorate new perspectives and rich discussion about the ways in which these objects affirm cultural values and express refined aesthetic sensibilities.”
Indigenous Beauty emphasises three interrelated themes – diversity, beauty and knowledge – that relate both to the works’ original contexts and to the ways in which they might be experienced by non-Native visitors in a contemporary museum setting. The exhibition is organised in 11 sections; while the objects within each section demonstrate common formal and functional qualities, the groupings are based primarily on geographic and cultural factors, allowing the viewer to perceive the impact of historical events as well as stylistic shifts over the course of decades or centuries. The range of work represented includes sculpture of the Northwest Coast; ancient ivories from the Bering Strait region; Yup’ik and Aleut masks from the Western Arctic; Kachina dolls of the Southwest pueblos; Southwest pottery; sculptural objects from the Eastern Woodlands; Eastern regalia; Plains regalia; pictographic arts of the Plains; and Western baskets.
Diversity is underlined as an essential aspect of indigenous American art, a corrective to the notion of a homogenous “American Indian” cultural and ethnic identity.
“Visitors to the exhibition are reminded that there is not just one North American Indian culture but hundreds of unique groups whose languages, mythologies and customs have evolved over the centuries,” says Andrew J. Walker, director of the Amon Carter. The comprehensive nature of the Dikers’ collection allows for this broad view of Native American art in all its complexity and historical specificity.”
A hallmark of the Diker Collection is the beauty and visual richness of the objects it comprises. The concept of formal beauty is the oldest and perhaps the strongest link between the material cultures of indigenous people and those of the Euro-American West. All known Native American languages include words that signify beauty or aesthetic quality, and many have more than one term to convey these concepts. For instance, in the language of Anishinaabe peoples which includes the Ottawa, Ojibwa or Algonquin, the word miikawaadiziwin refers to physical comeliness or handsomeness, while bishigendaagoziwin denotes beauty of a more spiritual and ethical nature. Such nuanced vocabularies influence the creation of objects within Native communities, each with its own criteria for technical excellence and aesthetic merit.
Cultural knowledge is inseparable from the practices of traditional art making in Native communities. From their elders, artists learn techniques for gathering and processing materials; production methods; a repertory of designs and patterns and the meanings they may contain; and often songs, prayers and rituals that are closely tied to art making. Over the last few decades, increased scholarship and closer collaborations between museums and Native communities have resulted in the recovery of knowledge about how objects were made, as well as their provenance and the ways they might have been used and understood in the contexts in which they originated.
Indigenous Beauty celebrates native North American artists whose visionary creativity and technical mastery have helped preserve cultural values across generations. The artists identified as members of many tribes and nations, each the product of complex and intertwined histories; and the captivating objects they created convey the extraordinary breadth and variety of Native American experience in North America. The exhibition shows both the deep historical roots of Native art and its dynamism, emphasising the living cultures and traditions of Native American groups through to the contemporary era.
Visitors to the Amon Carter can have a hands-on experience with many of the materials the artists used to create the objects in the exhibition. Tactile boards with several authentic materials (such as buffalo hide, abalone shells and seed beads) will be available for visitors to interact with while viewing the artworks.
Indigenous Beauty: Masterworks of American Indian Art from the Diker Collection is organised by the American Federation of Arts. This exhibition was made possible by the generosity of an anonymous donor, the JFM Foundation and Mrs. Donald M. Cox. The guest curator, David Penney, is an internationally recognized scholar of American Indian art. A fully illustrated catalogue presenting new research on the objects in the exhibition will include an essay by Penney, and contributions offer insight into the visual and material diversity of the collection, providing a greater understanding of the social and cultural worlds from which these works came. The catalogue will retail for $55 in the Museum Store. After closing at the Amon Carter, the exhibition travels to the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University (October 8, 2015 – January 3, 2016) and Toledo Museum of Art (February 14 – May 11, 2016).
Press release from the Amon Carter Museum of American Art website
Muscogee (Creek)(?) Georgia or Alabama Pipe bowl c. 1780 Wood, brass (?), ferrous nails (?), tin American Federation of Arts Diker no. 531
Anishinaabe, Ojibwa Ontario Shoulder bag (without strap) c. 1820 Hide, porcupine quills, tin cones, silk ribbon, dyed hair Courtesy American Federation of Arts Diker no. 586
Apsáalooke (Crow) Montana Boy’s shirt c. 1870 Hide, glass beads, cotton fabric, wool cloth, sinew, cotton thread Courtesy American Federation of Arts Diker no. 665
Tsimshian British Columbia Maskette 1780-1830 Wood, copper, opercula shell, pigment Courtesy American Federation of Arts Diker no. 681
Yup’ik Hooper Bay, Alaska Mask 1916-1918 Wood, pigment, vegetal fiber Courtesy American Federation of Arts Diker no. 788
Ancestral Columbia River people Washington State or Oregon Figure (Pendant?) 3rd-13th century Antler Courtesy American Federation of Arts Diker no. 529
Tlingit, Chilkat Klukwan, Alaska Tunic and leggings late 19th century Cedar bark, wool, metal cones Courtesy American Federation of Arts Diker no. 795
Zuni New Mexico Situlilu (Rattlesnake) Katsina 1910-1930 Cottonwood, pine, gesso, pigment, dyed horsehair, cornhusk, cotton cord Courtesy American Federation of Arts Diker no. 835
Hopi Arizona Qötsa Nata’aska Katsina 1910 Cottonwood, cloth, hide, metal, pigment Courtesy American Federation of Arts Diker no. 831
Amon Carter Museum of American Art 3501 Camp Bowie Boulevard Fort Worth, TX 76107-2695
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